Out of memory crash to desktop

[crusaderoath]

The situation I am crashing from is exactly as follows:
Warzone 2100 open and running a skirmish.
Several applications are running in the background including windows media player 11 and chrome with 12 tabs open along with ssh shells and xming.
I know that sounds like a lot, but my physical memory is still only at 54% used. and vista is setup to transfer memory into virtual space if physical memory is running low.

Anyways, at random (sometimes very early on in the battle, sometimes much later, but always) the game crashes to desktop and windows media player tells me that the system is running low on memory.

The game has crashed before without ANYTHING running in the background, but it gives no error -- just stops responding --.

[jaakan]

What happens if you change your memory setting to swap out as soon as windows want to vs "transfer memory into virtual space if physical memory is running low."?

And what are your system specs and swap space size?

[crusaderoath]

As a computer science student currently going through the ropes with creating and modifying vm memory maps under unix I can make certain that is not windows that is messing up, but the game.. Memory can be mapped at any time (load or no load) because everything not in active use at that exact moment is swapped out in place of space needed by the game. And again, this seems to be a memory leak more than anything.

[jaakan]

I'm not going to jump the gun say your wrong because you might have found a memory leak that doesn't show up in Linux but does in Windows.
Have you filed a bug report on this, with dump file and a debug output file? if you have not you should.

[crusaderoath]

Ok, now thats the weird part. The game does not produce a dump file when it crashes in this manner.. It just.. well.. dies. The only reason I started to notice it is that it has happened to me on two computers, it always happens with the --cheat extension in effect. It happens whether I use cheats or not. And it always happens in a skirmish. No dump files are produced when it crashes.. just a log of what was going on when I started it up. Is there some way to continuously push a log to file right up to the point of the crash?

[jaakan]

Get the Windows Installer (Debug version) if you have not already.
http://www.wz2100.net/download

Something like the follow will do it

"C:\Program Files\Warzone 2100\warzone2100.exe" --debug all --debugfile c:\wzdebug.txt
http://wiki.wz2100.net/Command_Line_Options

I have heard "--cheat" is buggy, focus on the crashes without this option.

[Tiberian]

yes, cheats are buggy, and often cause crashes. You should try without cheats.

[crusaderoath]

Ok, I have slimmed down what was causing the error. A windows media player related DLL that is running in the background on both my systems appears to be causing the crash.. Upon disabling the DLL the game has no issues. I am still trying to figure out what the DLL was doing exactly.

[Zarel]

Viruses often disguise themselves as legitimate DLLs. Have you tried a spyware scan or something?

[crusaderoath]

I have slimmed it down to a DLL relating to the processing of MKV files. Its either this or WhiteCap (a visualizer plugin). I have no viruses to speak of on my machine and have done a full scan for malware and malicious root kit software as well. This was a good opportunity to discover the fact that I did still have starforce on my machine and get rid of it. Anyways, I would call this a case closed. Remember to disable MKV file processing plugins for wmv if you plan on listening to music while playing warzone.