There was one point where I saved the game while trying to take a boat with heli’s on my ass and I died in the boat, however, when I re-spawned they were on top of me and I died immediately every time I spawned…over and over and over again.  I got pissed, left the game to play something else and started the next night and viola, it was like it was the first time through, where the heavy fire was after I got into the boat and I made it after a few tries.  This occurred a few times including the game saving during a fight for some reason (reminded me of Men of Valor issues) and I died every time I spawned and had to go back and start over from the previous save.

I had a few lock ups here and there that reminded me of the old days of gaming where after a few hours of play, a game would crash.  This seemed to remedy itself when I restarted.  Finally tonight, I get to Reckoning, the final level, and the game started locking up again.  There’s a cut scene with the Admiral that requires you to knock down the door and head for the flight deck for the showdown.  First time through the flight deck door wouldn’t open so I restarted the last save and pressed space bar to get past the cut scene.  I kept locking up when I went out, so I restarted, rebooted and finally reloaded the previous save, which put me through the freakin’ cut scene again that I let play through since I thought that skipping it corrupted the last save game.  FINALLY!!  The game saved as I entered the flight deck door (that opened this time) and I was on to the finale, or so I thought.  I hit the flight deck and it crashed again.  I rebooted, turned off AA and got out on the flight deck, kicked some ass and boom…blue screen, which is where I draw the line.  I finished the game by watching it on YouTube after reading a lot of people having issues on Reckoning but most of the posts were from 2008 and even 2009.  I didn’t go far enough to see if anyone tried the game this year.

I can only hope that Warhead won’t be the same crap.

Firefox never had these issues, even IE, while having more than FF, doesn’t have these little issue. So I rebuilt this past week with Windows 7, installed Firefox 3.5.1 and viola, Firefox has started having the EXACT same issues. Could it be my AT&T Uverse? Maybe, but not in the past have I noticed these issues but with Chrome. It almost seems that Firefox has made their changes for private browsing and whatever else they changed under the hood and added this annoying bug. I ended up logging into Facebook earlier using IE because it allowed me to rather than telling me there was a DNS error with Firefox for about 5 minutes straight. Oddly enough after I logged in with IE, it worked on Firefox with some delay.  Could it be Windows 7? Maybe but my laptop running FF 3.0.x has yet to show this behavior.

The newest problem seems to be with 3.5.2 and EXTREMELY slow page browsing. I load a video on YouTube and it keeps stammering as it tries to keep up. So I reset my router thinking maybe my connection was to blame (although speedtest.net didn’t seem to show it but could be lost packets somewhere) and the same thing. I tried to load the same page in IE and it works flawlessly. I’m not sure exactly what they’re doing with Firefox but it almost seems like Coke changing the formula while on top of the world. Firefox has slowly, and more recently, quickly started to make huge grounds on Internet Explorer but now at the height they seem to have stopped testing released code? I’m not sure, I’m just reporting what I’m seeing… Maybe others are seeing different results but when Facebook, Youtube and other popular sites are loading slow, it’s not good when the desktop browser is chugging along fine.

Again I’m a huge Firefox user and supporter but not if they’re trying to keep up with a fledgling browser and in the process have started to disregard the user experience. As for the testing, it’s already been published the security flaws in 3.5 so I’m wondering if this is the beginning of them being in the spotlight? What is that, now famous, quote? With great power comes great responsibility.

Regardless, a bit later I heard talking coming from my office.  I at first thought I’d lost my mind and my dogs were having a conversation.  Luckily (or maybe not) I found there were multiple Internet Explorer 7 windows opened and I saw tasks in the system tray running and realized I got hit with something while, I assume, on that page.   I did a clean up with several adware apps, Windows Defender and did a full virus scan which gave me multiple references in my registry and files on my drive (most residing in Windows, System32 or my temp folder). I deleted the files, allowed the programs to do the cleaning process of the registry in addition to me removing a few items listed in both the local user and local machine run keys and rebooted. On reboot, my Anti-Virus reported additional files. I rebooted into safe mode (which I should have done to begin with) and did additional cleaning which rendered little additional finds.   I rebooted again and things seemed to be OK until I attempted to launch IE7 for something (which I don’t use that much). I received the message Windows cannot find ‘C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe’.   When I right clicked on the icon, it took me to the path and selected the file, so it was still intact.

A few things I tried: Restoring IE default settings, copying the Internet Explorer folder from a working XP system (thinking iexplore.exe or a dll may have been corrupted or compromised), updating to IE8, uninstalling IE7 from Add/Remove programs and reinstalling, downloading IE7 again and allowed automatic update (which still worked) to install patches and when none of this rendered results, I cursed and screamed loudly at my PC but for some reason this too didn’t resolve the issue.

I had quit worrying about it, for the most part, since it’s the system I use as a media player, storage and a utility PC for backups, etc. and don’t really browse on it.  But it was always there laughing at me, pointing at me and making fun of me!!   So tonight I painted my face, stared the monitor down and said “Prepare for war”….

I started reading a bit more (searching for results from the past month or two) and found a site mentioning a key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\iexplore.exe.  I checked and iexplore.exe was pointing to a file in my System32 folder.  I checked my main system as well and found that there was no reference to iexplore.exe… I wanted to make sure it shouldn’t have the actual path before I just removed the key.  Sure enough, I deleted the key iexplore.exe key and Internet Explorer began working again.  There was also mention of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Browser Helper Objects.  I didn’t do anything with this key since I didn’t see anything creating any redirection.  I did, however, backup this branch and delete it.  IE7 still launched without issue but I did notice something set for Google, which I assume is something to do with me having it as my primary search.  I ended up restoring the key since that was one of these ‘objects’.

If you’re having this issue and have ran multiple scanning apps, malware apps, etc. and still having this problem, it’s probably because they aren’t picking up this exe redirection.  So my suggestion would be to export (back up) the iexplore.exe key (if it exists) and then delete it.  I didn’t do any rebooting in between and was able to immediately relaunch IE7 without an issue.  If this doesn’t work, you may also want to (again export first) delete the Browser Helper Objects key as well or see if looks like one of the keys are redirecting.  I’d say (as in I have no experience with this key) the worst that could happen with removing this key is you lose add-ons but it didn’t appear to break anything on mine (at least IE7 worked, the goal right?).  I also didn’t have this key on my primary system.

As always, the disclaimer is to proceed at your own risk and if this breaks something else, I’m not responsible.    I highly doubt it will (but it’s still your fault) and you have a backup (right?)…

I just wanted to share my experience with people who may be banging their head against the desk.  I did a quick search and it looks like this type of thing is on the rise the past few months (based on an advanced date search using Google).  Again, I can’t emphasis enough, ALWAYS back up registry keys you’re going to delete.

There are plenty of sites out there that will help you through the clean up process and I’m sure I could never cover all of them nor do I really want to in this post but here’s a few things to check after you do a clean up and before you get back up and running (if they’re not covered in the clean up process):

• Become a man/woman of faith
• Always go into IE’s properties, make sure your homepage isn’t redirected to a malware page
• Reset IE to default settings.  You can do this by right clicking on the IE desktop icon, selecting Advanced and clicking the Reset button.  Not verified but this should also fix the IE homepage but it’s best to verify the homepage anyway.   This resets every setting that’s changed as well as disabling any add-ons.
• Verify that your firewall is still up and running (it shut mine down when it initially kicked off
• Verify that your Anti-Virus is still running (it disabled mine).

My system seems to be running fine but we’ll see… these issues seem to have wreak havoc on a system that can, while may not be infection, cause other issues.  I intend to actually rebuild it soon anyway but I really wanted to win this war and it had been over a month of occasional trial and error.

Hopefully this helps a few people.    <— Now if I can figure out why WordPress doesn’t always do smilies when  I put them in! Argh… Let me know if it does, would like to hear from you…

I initially thought that I hadn’t done anything to warrant the concern but downloaded and installed a few spyware apps and Spywarefigher found an executable residing in my Program Files that looked like an MS patch that it reported as a trojan as well as a few tracking cookies.  I did the clean up and viola the crashes went away.  While it wasn’t a hard lesson learned, it was a lesson learned that running Virus protection is vital for the integrety of even gaming.

Thought I’d post that even if you think you’re privy to something like this, you may want to think again.  I’m still not sure what I did that allowed this to happen but I went ahead and installed AV even with the hit it takes on resources.

After some looking around, I found this article at Microsoft.com:

Method 3 is what I used to correct the issue.

Error message when you try to install Windows XP Service Pack 3: “Access is denied” or “Service Pack installation did not complete”

SYMPTOMS

The first thing I did while installing was remove UAC and the system ran very well.  I noticed it wasn’t quite as fast as XP but I traded it for the visually appealing look and how it functioned.  The honeymoon was shorter than Britney Spears first, then again maybe a little bit longer than that.  The slowdown continued to get worse, the application timeouts were numerous and WTH was Microsoft thinking with the search function?

The search is one of the worst concocted items with the new OS.  I’d do a search, it’d indicate that it could search faster if indexed (with my understanding of XP, I thought, sure!).  Eventually I started noticing my search process taking up HUGE chunks of memory.  I found where it stored the “indexing” and killed them and it restored some speed.  What’s odd is that the search function seems to have been built for a monkey.  It’s not that the XP built in feature is great (it doesn’t find a lot of items inside of a file) but it’s at least easy to click something like *.bmp, *.gif, *.jpg, etc. and return all the extensions I want.  I’m sure there is some other way to do it in Vista but why remove the simplicity that was in XP?  It was also a lot worse than XP when attempting to search within files (which is hard to do).  Regardless they need to overhaul the search.

The timeout on applications and even explorer are ridiculous.  I’m using an application such as Word 2003 and out of nowhere (and while typing with no apparent issues), it stops responding losing whatever I had done since the last save.  Worst is in graphic programs where you don’t save every minute and lose a crap load of work.  I’ve had issues where I’m browsing a network drive and suddenly Explorer just crashes with no signs of an issue.

Games kicked off slower and frame rates were significantly lower than on XP.  Anyone who says they’re running Vista and getting 100+ frames on an 8800GTS (as I have) running at high resolutions (which they rarely include their resolution) with high effects on games like UT3 are full of it.  It’s simply not happening or they’re leaving out that it’s at 800×600 or with dual cards (which I still suspect is not the case in terms of FPS).

Again, as opposed to a lot of others, I like what the OS is about but they did a piss poor job of implementation and optimization.   We’ll see how the release candidate of SP1 does on my laptop but unlike previous versions of Microsoft OSes, I have a feeling that I’ll not jump until potentially SP2 is released or I see some substantial increases on my laptop.