Hi guys,

I seem to have a strange issue, probably something with graphics, on one of my PCs. I've been trying to get rid of it for a very long time to no avail.

This is what happens:

• The game will lock-up / freeze for some ten seconds
  
• Happens in multiplayer, single player, or even when watching a replay
  
• Happens randomly, i.e. I can play 15 laps without it, or it will happen twice in a single 5 lap race
  
• When it happens, the image remains frozen, and the sound plays in a loop (half-second engine noise and 2 seconds or so of silence)
  
• Afterwards, my car will appear further on the track, usually crashed against a wall...
  
• When I saved a replay of this happening, my car simply disappeared from the track for those 10 seconds, and then reappeared further (crashed, etc)

This is my HW/SW combination:

• ASUS mainboard (don't remember exact model number, can lookup if needed)
  
• nVidia GeForce FX 5500 AGP card
  
• WinXP home

After going through these forums, I couldn't find anyone seeing this particular issues, all the lock-ups i could find were of a different nature. I've tried to play with various graphic options (disabled / reduced most of the things) but it didn't help so far, and I don't know what else should I try. Someone mentioned to disable AGP fastwrite in BIOS - disabled but it doesn't help either.

I have a very similar configuration on another PC, with FX5200 Card and a slight bit older graphic driver, other than this the PC is much older (slower CPU, older mainboard) and there I don't have any issues, aside from performance being worse of course.

If anyone has any clues, I'd highly appreciate it and try it right away! :-)

Rado

PS: If you want to just see how it appears when it happens, just go to a multiplayer race and stay in spectate. Then go to graphic options and toggle the "half texture size" setting. The behavior while the setting is changing is very very similar (image frozen, sound loops for a few seconds).

Weird, the only lockups I've seen are mini-lockups every couple of seconds that were caused by background programs. Long shot but worth a try if you haven't already (killing off everything you can, that is).

I'm assuming no problems with any other game?

Does the hard drive LFS is situated on make any iffy noises when these lock up's occur? If you have another drive, move the LFS folder over to it (I'm not sure if it requires another unlock but it probably doesn't) and see if this does anything.

And what programs do you run in the background? I remember at work some silly administrator set a virus scan to start on the server at 9am, this would slow the server down hard core during those busy morning hours.

And when these lock up's happen does the computer freeze or is it just LFS? Simply hit the Windows key on your keyboard or ALT + TAB to see if its locked fully.

I had a similar problem that was bugging me for months. In my case it was Intel's Application Accelerator causing periodic .5 second freezes. That's probably not your issue, but the steps I took to troubleshoot my problem may work for you, too.

1. Download Process Explorer. It's tiny and free and doesn't install any garbage on your system (doesn't even need to be installed). This is a more advanced version of Task Manager. It will let you get detailed CPU/disk usage information about processes, modules (DLLs) loaded by a process, even individual threads within a process.

2. Right-click on the column view on the right and click "Select Columns". Go the the Process Performance tab and check CPU Usage and CPU History. This will give you a seperate CPU and disk-usage history bar for each process in your system.

3. Go back to LFS and play. When it freezes up, quickly TAB back to Process Explorer (as soon as Windows will let you) and look at the history bars. Look for a CPU or disk-usage spike in one of the processes, corresponding to the freezup in LFS.

From there, how you troubleshoot depends on the process that's causing the problem. In my case, I noticed that the 'System' process had regular CPU spikes, at 90 second intervals or so. I had to find out what part of the System process was causing the problem.

If you right-click on a process and select Properties, it will give you a larger view of that processes CPU/disk usage. It will also give you a Threads list, which gives you CPU usage for individual threads within that process. At this level of granularity, it's actually showing you how many context switches (number of times that Windows gave CPU time to that thread) per update interval.

I noticed that a driver named iaStor.sys was getting an inordinate amount of context switches when my LFS freezes were happening. I googled iaStor.sys (Process Explorer has Google support built-in) and found that iaStore.sys is Intel Application Accelerator. I update the driver for that, and my problem went away.

No way I could have solved this without Process Explorer.


Oh, I should mention that this is a sort of last resort troubleshooting method which is done after you do the more obvious stuff, namely:

1. Open Task Manager or Process Explorer and shut down every process that is not needed to run windows. You can use MSCONFIG to prevent a lot of these from starting in the first place.

2. Open Services (Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services) and shut down every service that is not needed to run Windows. You may have to look up some of these to determine what they do and if you need them, but it's time well spent.

I do audio recording on my machine, so making sure I have no background tasks interrupting my recordings is an absolute must. My task list is pretty much empty, and I only have about 10-15 services running, most of which are core, required Windows services.

Thank you guys for your responses! First of all, I must say that I found out something while playing with the "Graphics" options a bit more. It seems that when I turn off the "Hardware Vertex Shading" it will not crash. At least yesterday, I could play about 30+ laps with no crash.

However, the bad thing about this is the performance drop that makes it unplayable. On Blackwood Rallycross I only get 25 fps, and when the race starts (many cars in one place) 10-15 fps Normally with hardware vertex shading on I get up to 70 fps.

Bob Smith: I've tried stopping all I could, but I'll try to go through every single process to see if it will help... I must confess that I don't play any other games I can hardly make time for LFS between my work and personal life

Robble: I'm not 100% sure but I don't remember any disk activity during these lockups. But I'll remember to check this, as well as to alt+tab from LFS when it happens to see if it's only LFS or if windows is frozen completely, and report back. I don't have any background tasks (like antivirus) scheduled so it wasn't this. Once when windows update started to download/install its stuff while playing LFS, it only LED to much worse performance in LFS but not to a complete lockup.

Eric Tetz: I know Process Explorer as well as other Sysinternals excellent utilities, but didn't think of this. Thanks for your advice I'll try it out! Also thanks for your very detailsed instructions!

Hi immutability

I dont have a Nvidia card installed atm however do your drivers allow for temprature monitoring or any control of the fan speed? if so try setting this to get to maximum speed well before your card heats up to say 60% of the max temp, because you say this doesent happen when HVS is off I would bet that you have a driver issue or a temp issue with your card.

there are 3rd party drivers that allow you to do the temp monitoring and fan speed IIRC.

SD.

So here's a short report with my further observations and results of ProcessExplorer monitoring:

1. When the lock up occurs, I can't switch to another app, nor switch num-lock status. But the key presses get buffered and executed after the system starts responding
   
2. No disk activity when the lock up occurs
   
3. Tried to stop all services and kill all processes but the necessary ones + antivirus remained running too, as well as process explorer.

The lock up occured after about 7 laps on BW rallyx, that is some 8+ minutes. This is what I found out when I looked at ProcessExplorer's performance history:

1. CPU history for LFS process has 2 charts - green and red, green apparently showing CPU usage, but I don't know what red is? Anyway, normally while driving the CPU (green) was at avg. 80%, red one being much lower, perhaps 30%. At the time of lock up, green went to some 99%, and red had a major spike to ~100% too. Afterwards both have dropped.
   
2. As for other processes, I didn't notice anything strange, nVidia driver helper service had a very small IO spike at the same time, but it wasn't bigger than other ones while playing.
   
3. The csrss (windows core) process did have have CPU (both green & red) spike to about 30% at the same moment, whereas it was at 0% (both green & red) all other time. I don't know if this is related, but you really wouldn't want to kill this one

Do you have any other ideas? What I'm gonna try now is to update the graphic card drivers to see if it helps, and eventually reduce some of the BIOS settings (like switching from AGP 8x to AGP 4x).

SparkyDave: this particular card doesn't have a fan, it does have a HUUUUGE passive heatsink covering the whole card. One of the reasons I got it - to keep the PC noise level down a bit. I didn't see any temp monitor in nVidia driver but I'll google if I can find something. Otherwise I can only remove the case and use my hand to monitor temperature, and see if it's an overheating issue?

Rado

Quote from immutability :

1. The csrss (windows core) process did have have CPU (both green & red) spike to about 30% at the same moment, whereas it was at 0% (both green & red) all other time. I don't know if this is related, but you really wouldn't want to kill this one

Do you have any other ideas?

Well, the spike in iaStore.sys that was freezing up LFS on my system was only about 30%. In fact, until I widened the CPU History column in Process Manager, the blip was too small to see (only a few pixels high), but it was enough to jack-up LFS.

I would look for any activity that lasts about as long as your freezup in LFS.

If it turns out that csrss is the only culprit, you can go into the thread view to see if there is anything unusual going in in csrss. Set the update interval on PM to 5-10 seconds, so that the offending thread will still be on top when you are able to tab back to PM.

That's all I can think of ATM. Good luck, man.

I had the same problem! Well, it sounds the same. Anywho, my cure:
Options > Graphics > Haze Effect - OFF

My problem symptoms included:
-Process Explorer spiked to 100% during the lockup
-It happened randomly, seemingly without a pattern. When watching a replay of the race, it would lockup randomly as well, not at the same time it did in the original race.
-Time continues for the game in single player, so if I was to jab my brakes when it froze, I'd unfreeze to find myself spun out from brake lock.
-Happened in all modes of play
-NVidia GeForce FX 5500 (Same card! Might be the problem!!)
-The sound did a weird loop thing, like it was caught repeating the same sound chunk over the span of one second (this was prior to the U30 sound upgrade)
-I was running U without a patch.


I discovered the solution when I did, as it seems you have tried, changing all my graphics settings to as low as possible. I turn off haze effect included, and it cured it. I went back, put it all back on, and it happened. So I lowered one option at a time until the lockups went away, and thats how I discovered it.

What drivers are you currently using for your card? And do the 5500 models even support heat stats?

immutability you say you're running WinXP Home (which might I add is awful) is it service packed? Have you kept the security updates in check?

As for the GFX card overheating, you'd probably notice artifacts or dodgey colours or something before it has any slow down on the machine itself. Ive read that the vertex shading was being a pain in the butt for another user with crashes and what not.

If you have another drive hooked up on the system, move LFS over to that drive as it still sounds like thats the reason in my opinion. Other possible reasons could be as followed :

Virus / Spyware
CPU getting too hot (could be dust clogging the fans air flow)
Hard drive is near its end of life
Possibly GFX issues, i suggest you swap it with your other card to see if it has any effect + New drivers

And if all else fails, kill the lot and make a fresh install of Windows, perhaps something you installed cocked up the registry or something silly. A fresh install from time to time saves alot of hassle, I myself reinstall Windows every month or so.

Good luck

Guys, thank you again for all your support. The more I think of it the more it seems to me that it could be an overheating issue. While testing it first happened after some 8-9 laps, and then more often, though I didn't get any artifacts, etc, before the image freeze... When I removed the case cover, the graphic card heatsink was so hot I couldn't even touch it, but the CPU heatsink as well as the chipset heatsink (passive) were much "colder" (that is I could touch them both and keep holding).

Worse (or better?) thing is I couldn't reproduce today - I drove 20 laps without lock up so I couldn't test anything else yet. However I have a plan of next things to try out, and once I get somewhere, I'll post my results here. More things to try:

• Turn off Haze: thanks for the idea Shinrar! I think I've tested it with Haze off before, but I'll give it one more try as I don't remember. And your issue looks almost exactly like mine
  
• Try running from another hard-drive
  
• Do some more Process Explorer monitoring
  
• Move the (huge SB Live) sound card farther from the graphic card - may be causing heat to build up as they are really too close.
  
• Try to reduce BIOS settings like the AGP rate
  
• Try to install WinXP on one of the spare drives I have and running on a clean system

Robble: WinXP home is just fine for me at home and the license was cheaper I only use this box for browsing and graphics. As I also do some network administration at work I keep the system clean and up-to-date with security fixes etc, so that really shouldn't be an issue. While doing the process cleanup yesterday to test if it helps, I didn't find anything I wouldn't expect running in the background, so there should be no spyware either. But anyway thanks for all your other suggestions (swapping graphic card, HDD, etc, will eventually give it a try if all else fails)

So thanks again guys, and wish me luck!

Rado

Wow too hot to touch sounds bad think of how hot the actual heat source(gpu) is
You know what you could try, If you have a spare case or cpu fan laying around, you could try positioning it above the small gap in between your GFX card and sound card so it blows air straight down towards the motherboard, Zalman make a great bracket for this but its reasonable easy to DIY fix a fan without one.

This would give you some airflow across the huge heatsink it doesn't have to blow fast just some airflow and it could give you some indication if heat is the issue.

Keep trying things and you will fix this issue

SD.

Just a quick report on my progress (not much...)

• Turning off Haze - didn't help
  
• ProcessExplorer monitoring interval set to 2seconds - no peaks detected in any other process but LFS this time
  
• AGP reduced to 4x in BIOS (lowest value) - didn't help

I was racing a 20-lap BW rallycross, and today the lock up occured in the 9th lap, and then in 16th. So it didn't start to occur more often after the first one...

Thanks for your idea SparkyDave, I'll try to dig up some old fan tomorrow and tie it to the GFX card to see if it'll make any difference! BTW I had 3 similar of these huge-passive-heatsink cards, 2x FX5200 and this one FX5500, and I remember that they all used to be extremely hot when taking them out of PC after turning it off. But this one seem to be even more.

Rado

Seems I fixed it, thanks to you guys! Yesterday I've decided to move the sound card 2 slots down, and while I was at it, I found an old chipset fan (those small ones), tied it to the heatsink using 2 rubber bands - not a sophisticated or very elegant solution but works perfectly!

The heatsink of course still gets hot after some time, but I can actually touch and hold it without a problem and without the risk of burning my fingers. I could also complete 3 5-lap races and one 20-lap race without a single hiccup, so I assume the overheating was the real issue.

I'll try to bring back all the settings (i.e. AGP back to 8x, etc) to see if it will come back or not (hopefully). But the funny thing though is that switching AGP from 8x to 4x didn't have any difference on performance (I really mean it - framerates in the game are the same, didn't notice anything).

So once again, thank you for all your help guys. And maybe this thread will help someone else with a similar issue in the future too

Rado

I'm almost 100% sure it's an overheating problem then. Try cleaning as much dust out of the case as possible if you haven't done so already, and use a program like speedfan to make sure your fans are running at a reasonable speed. Try to clean off your fans' blades while you are at it with a cue tip or something and make sure that they arn't under alot of resistance (bearings shot?) while trying to spin. That would be why most GPU's have heatsinks as well as fans now.