Bizarre issue with games crashing immediately

Ninja Snarl P

So here's the deal: I have a brother a hojillion miles away with a computer we built together for him to go to college with. The thing has been working just fine for a couple years now, except this time he went back, installed Adblocker Plus and a couple Origin games, and now ANY GAME which requires even a modicum of system resources to run simply crashes immediately at the logo screen/splash image. However, old games, the kind that require little in the way of resources, run fine. And immediately after he started using the system after coming back for the summer, the system ran completely and thoroughly fine. The crashes don't even come with error messages; the game is started, splash/startup screen appears, and then the game crashes out.

Originally, I thought this might be his video card gone bad and there was some error causing a crash the moment the video card starting getting worked over, but I had him run a 3dmarks demo and it ran completely fine; that should mean that not only is the card functional, but the drivers are functioning as well. Otherwise, 3dmarks would've crashed like the games keep crashing once it was used/stressed. I don't see how it could be a RAM or CPU issue either, as 3dmarks should've also activated both of those resources plenty in order to cause a crash error.

So here is the list of attempted fixes:

-verify game caches
-update GPU drivers
-uninstall and reinstall Steam
-uninstall and reinstall specific games
-uninstall Origin
-uninstall Adblocker Plus
-check to make sure UAC is disabled
-check to make sure antivirus isn't interfering
-uninstall GPU drivers, run driver/registry cleaner programs, reinstall drivers
-alter the compatibility mode of Steam to XP and run it as an administrator
-flash the motherboard with an updated BIOS

I'm no IT guy, but I've been dealing with computers a long while and this has me completely stumped. All I can figure at this point is some bizarre hardware fault, a thoroughly strange driver issue, or some sort of permission problem within Windows itself. At this point, the only thing I can think of is a complete system wipe and reinstall, which is going to another pain because (sigh) my brother didn't keep his Windows disc with the computer.

I don't have the system specs in front of me, but I'm hoping somebody has a solution for this, because I definitely don't.

Le_Goat

The last time this happened to me, it was the graphics card. You said you updated the drivers, but did you try rolling the graphic card's driver back to a previous version? I'm not going to say this is definitely the problem, but it could be.

Going on the same lines as rolling back, was there an update that was done (for Windows or any other software) that was done just prior to the crashes? Any hardware changes just prior to the crashing?

With the crashes, does just the game crash or does the system itself crash? Have you checked the system logs to see if anything is in there? The games that crash: are they installed directly from CD\DVD or via a download? If the latter, try installing a game that is directly from a CD\DVD.

Ninja Snarl P

Le_Goat wrote: »

The last time this happened to me, it was the graphics card. You said you updated the drivers, but did you try rolling the graphic card's driver back to a previous version? I'm not going to say this is definitely the problem, but it could be.

Going on the same lines as rolling back, was there an update that was done (for Windows or any other software) that was done just prior to the crashes? Any hardware changes just prior to the crashing?

With the crashes, does just the game crash or does the system itself crash? Have you checked the system logs to see if anything is in there? The games that crash: are they installed directly from CD\DVD or via a download? If the latter, try installing a game that is directly from a CD\DVD.

Thanks for the response, but there was definitely something wrong with one of the games (or a game-related program) installed. Just before committing to a full reformat and reinstall, my brother went and uninstalled virtually everything but Windows from his computer; when he started reinstalling games afterwards, everything worked just fine. No hardware changes or hardware patches before the incident, either; same hardware that was in place for at least a year, with no patching immediately before the problem.

As for the crashing, it was entirely the games crashing, not the system. The game would do the splash logo, if it had one, then immediately shut down, no crash logs or anything. When watching in the task manager, the .exe would pop up, then just disappear. It really didn't even sound like a crash to me, more like something shutting it down. Had him uninstall antivirus, malware blockers, shut off UAC, everything I could think of, but nothing mattered.

My best guess is that something to do with Origin/Punkbuster/BF3 was what screwed up his system. He said everything was working fine when he came back, but went to crap after installing BF3. I've had weird hardware issues from BF3-related stuff myself, so it wouldn't surprise me.

I'll keep your info in mind, though; no telling at all if it the issue won't crop up again.

Bendery It Like Beckham

Could he have been possibly running some kind of overlay? Like for TS3 or mumble/steam. Those can cause crashes like that because they aren't hooking the driver properly which causes them to just go "nope, better luck next time"

Ninja Snarl P

He doesn't run with overlays from stuff like Teamspeak/Mumble (or use them at all). I would say the Steam overlay could be a thing because he definitely uses Steam, except there were plenty of old games that would run just fine on Steam. Plus, Origin games would crash out instantly just like Steam games. The only common thread I could see was that games that needed a big chunk of resources would crash out, except no amount of video card driver fiddling would ever change anything.

You can see why this thing had us going in circles for something like two weeks; I've never even heard of an issue like this before, to have some games crash out and others not, but all the crashes happened consistently and without any indicators of why.

Bendery It Like Beckham

nevermind