Possible cause for BSP crashes

[Axis_Crusher]

Got BSP for a year and a half and never had a single problem. I read a lot about players that get crashes, etc.

Today my game started fine, I started a map and 5 minutes in the game froze, the screen made multi-coloured dots and the sound looped. This was followed by the screen shutting down and the PC rebooting.

I set the graphics to minimum and the game to windowed which worked completely fine. As soon as i bumped the resolution above 800x600 all @@@ broke loose again.

I ran taskmanager while the game was windowed and witnessed a phenomenon: task manager showed an average CPU usage of 30% but core 1 was at max and the remaining cores of the CPU hardly made a line at all! That's when the game crashed.

My PC is not underpowered:
9800GT 1GB
4GB RAM
2.66 Intel Quad core (45nm)
DirectX 11
Windows Vista
1TB + 160GB HDD

Game ran fine until this morning with graphics maxed out.
It is now running at 800x600, windowed, all other graphics off.

[chip5541]

Between the last play and the one which crashed, did you install or update anything?

[Axis_Crusher]

Nothing. I installed nothing that I know of except that windows media encoder ans associated scrap. But I played a game since that. I set bsp.exe to "realtime priority" earlier today to get a performance boost but reset it back to normal. This morning just before the crashes I installed the midway modders mappack for BSM.

Each time I start the game a "hardware changed" dilogue box appears and says my momory changed from 2000+mb to 1000+mb or vice versa and asks me if I want to auto-detect settings.

Other than that nothing changed.

[Axis_Crusher]

UPDATE:
It appears that windows media encoder 9 series is the culprit. I uninstalled the security update for it and things started to improve and when i uninstalled the program and restarted the PC things ran good. had no crashes sofar and the load is now split between the 4 cores.
Microsoft says it is a problem with how the program allocates resources and in a way "jammed" the 3 other cores.

1 more reason why I don't use Windows update and microsoft software....

[Axis_Crusher]

ANOTHER UPDATE:
Crashes started all over again. The game now crashes about 20 minutes into campaign missions. Skirmish works fine.

[Arrow]

I take it you did a reinstall...it looks to me like a corruption of the campaign files or something. The game itself must be fine if Skirmish works.

[Axis_Crusher]

windows media encoder 9 series wass the culprit together with the BSM mappacks, strange though. All works fine now