Major crash issues, any ideas?

[Marty4]

Hey all, I'm wondering if anyone on IW is familiar with the problems I'm having. I can't seem to find any solutions to these bizzare issues, so I'm hoping against hope that one of you has run up against it yourselves and figured out a solution.

I just bought a 3-in-1 IWD box set off Amazon, consisting of a DVD of IWD, a DVD of HoW, and a DVD of IWD2. I'm attempting to play IWD, but after a flawless playthrough of the prologue, the game crashed when attempting to play the cinematic to begin chapter 1. Now I can't start the game back up due to an "assertion error" at "line 2390", whatever that means. A google search indicated that this is a thing that a lot of vista users get, and nobody seemed to have any suggestions other than the routine "clean your disk, patch your game, etc.", none of which has helped.

I patched with the official IWD patch, no luck. I can't install the HoW or Trials of the Luremaster patches because it says that HoW isn't installed, even though it is.

Any ideas, guys? Thanks in advance.

[ElfBane]

Well, you've probably tried these, but here goes... try running the game in XP compatibility mode. If that doesn't work, you may have to actually try a VM.

1. Also, are you running the game modded? If so, remove all mods and see what happens.

2. The PC not letting you install the HoW patch means that you probably have some Registry problem. Which means you may need to COMPLETELY uninstall the entire game. Run a Registry cleaner (AT YOUR OWN RISK) that looks for orphaned Registry entrys and removes them. Then re-install the game. If you are deep into the game and don't wish to restart, then backup your saves and reintroduce them to the new install of IWD. Make sure you do a full install of IWD.

3. If what you bought was a recent re-release of IWD, then I can't imagine that the HoW disk would have been shipped unpatched. But if you bought an older new or used bundle, then I suppose it's possible that the HoW expansion was unpatched.

Hope this helps.

[Marty4]

I had no idea there was an option to run it in XP compatibility mode! I was able to do that, run as an admin, and then patch it with Trials of the Luremaster, and it looks like I'm in business.

Thanks Elfbane!