Reason: Multiplayer Drop-To-Desktop Bug

[DMA57361]

You all know the multiplayer bug where one or more uses drops to the desktop? There has been many a question about it in this forum over and over. If you don't the general gist is that for no apparent reason one random machine in the game either locks up or drops to the desktop with no errors, and the game continues for the other players with a "Played XXX has left" message.

I have a theory on what is causing it. The automatic game saving feature.

Why do I think this? Well . . . me and my sister decided to play a game since we've not tried in ages, I was hoping the bug was hardware or OS linked or something and would have gone away. No such luck. A short while in the game locks on my sisters computer, so we restart the game and reconnect the multiplayer. I remember that the game autosaves . . I hope into the load screen and load the most recent one. I get a "Cannot load, other machine doesn't have matching save" error, which is odd. But the second oldest autosave works perfectly . . and is about 5-10mins back in the game. We loaded that one game a few times and with a surprising amount of regularity it crashed after about 5-10mins each time. Each time the newest autosave failed with the 2nd working. The computer that locked or dropped to desktop varied, and so did the computer as the host.

If the newest autosave is only on one of the computers that would imply the other fails while, or just before, making it - since they are made in sync with one-another to be loaded later on!

Can someone else confirm my little test for me?

And if we agree this could be the problem could you nice Muckyfoot people tell me how to disabled the autosave? (Since that'll be easier than you releasing a bug-fix patch or whatever.)