EAccessViolation

[Jezzrian]

I have NWN and SOU, and had both of the installed until recently when I have to reinstall the game (long story). However when I tried to play it i was goven the maessage EAcessViolation. Without SoU installed it runs fine, if I do the critical rebuild it runs fine but appears to uninstall SoU, which isn't exactly what I want. If i then install SoU after running the critical rebuild I get the same problem,

Any ideas on how to solve this?

Jezz

[philip]

Is your game fully patched? Have you tried rebooting?

[Jezzrian]

Hmmm, running the critical rebuild and then patching to 1.62 allows me to get to the menu, but then when I try to configure I get EAccessViolation and then I try to play I get nwmain has caused an error in NWMAIN.EXE. Rebooting and/or reinstalling gets me nowhere.

Any ideas for this problem?

Jezz

[andrewas]

If I remember rightly this is due to a 'copy protection' called 'secuROM' that the morons at Atari insist on including with their product and 'upgrading' with every release, with the result that with every patch and expansion, more and more people start to have problems.

One known fix is to hunt out a no-CD patch, but scan it for viruses before you install it, at least one of the NWN no-CDs is infected with something nasty. And if you do this and it works, send nasty emails to Atari tech support, they persistently deny that secuROM is anything short of perfect and insist any problems are due to something else, but if enough people blast them over it something will be done.

Other than that, installing the latest drivers for your motherboard and so on may give some help.

Ironicaly, if you actualy did have an illegal copy, this is the last thing you would have problems with. Shame Atari havent gotten their heads around this yet.

[Jezzrian]

Thanks, any ideas where to find one? I wonder why it decided to stop working? It ran just fine yesterday...

Jezz

[andrewas]

Damn. Not secuROM at all.

The trouble is that when you uninstalled SoU, the installer left things behind, and one of them is causing trouble. Backup all custom contnet, saves and characters, and uninstlal the game, then delete the directory, then install again from scratch.

[Jezzrian]

Strangely enough I've just tried that. Seems to have worked but I've now got the 'invalid pointer bug'. However that one there is a cure for, though its a tad annoying.

Thanks for all of the help

Jezz

[banzai]

Originally posted by andrewas: The trouble is that when you uninstalled SoU, the installer left things behind, and one of them is causing trouble. Backup all custom contnet, saves and characters, and uninstlal the game, then delete the directory, then install again from scratch.

Yes - but oftimes the uninstaller left things behind in the registry too. So after backing up, uninstalling and deleting the game´s root directory you have to check your registry for entries pointing to the deleted files (missing servers in Windows speak). This is a VERY tedious task if done with regedit or regedit32 - so do the Google for a tool called regclean, download it and check it for viruses. RegClean is from MS and it worked fine for me on Win 9x, 2000 and XP. It checks your registry for missing servers and deletes these entries - the good thing is it logs its actions in a *.reg file in it´s startup directory. If something is wrong afterwards (occured never for me) with a single double-click on the appropriate *.reg file you´re able to undo the deletions restoring the original state of your registry.

Hope that helps a bit ...

[Jezzrian]

I just manually used regedit to delete the bits that were hanging around, so it all worked prettily. Of course then windows decided to freeze halway through a system restore losing half of its files so we had to reload it, making me have to install nwn _again_. And I'd only just gotten it to work.

Life just isnt fair sometimes

Jezz