That is an excellent suggestion phi - I hadn't thought of that.

 I can also say disabling hdwe accel on sound didn't help...but I found newer drivers I didn't know about, so I'll try that too and let you know how it goes.

Thanks again

Okay!

 In the interest of solving the problem--and still being able to pass the info on to others--I tried things in stages:

Hardware acceleration changed in dxdiag was a no-go:  still crashed

New sound card drivers didn't change anything--I tried it, and after a while I crashed just the same

Like I said in a post, the crash is intermittent, but...so far, ever since I disabled the XP wallpaper (active desktop junk that runs it), I haven't crashed once!

I'll keep my fingers crossed that this is the solution, but for now--I decided to also disable Themes.  This is my gaming rig: we don' need no steenkeng window-dressing!  That stuff grabs resources it has no business grabbing.

Thanks phi, and also jeffers for the tips!

Winter

Glad you've stabilised. Was the background animated? if so it would have been hogging resources on your video card and causing the problem.

Thanks for letting us know the result and we're glad to help

Well, while it worked, it was nice. 

As I think I'd mentioned, the problem is random.

I got by for a week or two, then crashed once.

With the latest patch?  I'm crashing like mad.  And as much fun as it might be to do a complete re-install again...or do the "patch verification process is tricksy!" tips...I don't think that's going to solve the problem any more than it did the last time.

 I wish my machine's logs would show an entry, but when I crash and come back, there's nothing.  I run benchmark tests for hours and everything's stable as can be.  I try underclocking all my hardware and...still get crashes.

This time, it crashed once when I was standing still, once when I Hyper-Jumped, and once when I tried to open the Mission dialog box.  But it's also crashed when I'm turning to face an opponent, going in/out of Interlock...I don't think there's any one event that's triggering it.  Especially when it happens so randomly.

The problem seems to stem for your graphics card being on the cusp of supporting directX 9.0c fully so there are a few features that don't always work quite right and are crashing it.

Your best bet for fixing this will be to try different video drivers. Make sure to use DriverCleaner Pro (you have to pay for platinum) after each driver uninstall. Otherwise the drivers could still be using the wrong files.

First start with a complete removal of you video drivers, run driver cleaner, then put the latest version drivers on.

let us know how that goes.

Thanks Phi!  This is good information.

 Ahh...DirectX 9.0c - what a series of unfortunate events, if you've seen how many dot-release flavors are floating around out there.  If my video card's not quite 9.0c compliant, I can see why there'd be a problem.

I've had a lot of stuff keep me from working on this, but lucky me--just got brand new drivers last night from nVidia.  I'll download DriverCleaner Pro and if the new driver set crashes, I'll use that to be sure I've removed all files, then reinstall the drivers.

Your work has not gone unnoticed--a friend of mine brought me back here--she got to reading your post and it reminded her of all the other tools and things you can find at http://www.guru3d.com - I'm going to see if I can't also pull something down that will more closely monitor things.

 Thanks again--as always, I'll post my progress here.

Winter

*hides* I feel like an 8 year old posting in a group of computer gurus, but you could have bad RAM. I installed MxO on this e-machine (Sempron 1.8 ghz, 256 MB of RAM). I added a new video card (Radeon 9550, 128 MB of RAM, I believe) and another 512 of RAM. Well, the new stick of 512 turned out to be bad. Jeffers and phi know more about this than I do, but I wanted to post it as a suggestion because the crashing pattern was the same as yours was; I could go for two hours and be fine, or I might only be able to jack in for 30 seconds.

Anyway, good luck.

Thanks Phi!  This is good information.

 Ahh...DirectX 9.0c - what a series of unfortunate events, if you've seen how many dot-release flavors are floating around out there.  If my video card's not quite 9.0c compliant, I can see why there'd be a problem.

I've had a lot of stuff keep me from working on this, but lucky me--just got brand new drivers last night from nVidia.  I'll download DriverCleaner Pro and if the new driver set crashes, I'll use that to be sure I've removed all files, then reinstall the drivers.

Your work has not gone unnoticed--a friend of mine brought me back here--she got to reading your post and it reminded her of all the other tools and things you can find at http://www.guru3d.com/ - I'm going to see if I can't also pull something down that will more closely monitor things.

 Thanks again--as always, I'll post my progress here.

Winter

The reason that 100% DX 9.0c is important is that between 9.0b and 9.0c there were some new shader features that were added that MxO uses. On older cards they produce somewhat unpredictable VRAM corruption or 3D calculation issues (all those lovely pics you see from users that have their RSIs triangles going crazy or textures going missing). Some of those cards now have drivers that deal with these a little better.

Basically, the bottom line is that the systems Minimum required specs include "100% Microsoft DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card", so unless your's is it's not supported by SOE... and DirectX 10 is out now for Vista so older cards are being forced off the bottom end of things. We'll do our best but unless you meet the minimum specs we can't guarantee a result.

As an additional request... Have you made any hardware changes in the recent past? Any time you open your case we have to cover the possibility that there is a hardware fault.

zdn16's idea isn't a bad one but is certainly one of the last options to check as it's such a hard/costly issue to diagnose.