Doom 3 causes "Serious Error" on my PC...

[cohiba]

Whenever I run Doom 3, it hangs during one of the introductory videos, then after a few seconds, XP comes back with an error message similar to the following:

"Doom 3 has caused a serious error and will be shut down. We apologize for any inconvenience."

WTF??

I have a fairly plain-jane system: Celeron 2.5GHz, 512MB RAM, Win XP Pro SP2 (problem occurred before and after update), a new Power Cooler Radeon 9600XT 128MB (OEM packaged from MWave), and the latest Catalyst drivers (v4.8, and currently on 4.9 beta). The sytem has run pretty much flawlessly for almost a year, and the only hardware change ever on this PC was the video card from an old TNT2 to the 9600XT. And yes, I did uninstall the NVIDIA drivers.

I tried turning off every special video effect, tried both 640x480 and 800x600 resolutions. I tried full screen and windowed. I tried escaping past the videos, but the game still hangs a second or two after starting.

Next, I uninstalled anything I could live without (pop-up blocker, WinPatrol, etc), and even tried disabling Symantec AV. I've also tried uninstalling and reinstalling the Catalyst Drivers, I even tried reinstalling Doom 3, but to no avail.

I keep a pretty clean machine, so I rapidly ran out of things to delete, uninstall, or otherwise nuke. I suppose it might be a hardware problem, but I sure hope not. Please, somebody, cure my stupidity, and enlighten me with the one little obvious thing that I am overlooking. I am seriously jonesing for my Doom 3 fix!!!!

 

[n7]

I think it's rejecting the Celery.

Sorry...seriously, check the Doomworld forums, as if it's a software bug, someone will have experienced it too i'm sure.

 

[Carbonadium4]

i had some random d3 error.. en up reinstalling windows just to be safe.. works ever since.

 

[Sideswipe001]

Have you updated your motherboard's drivers?

 

[cohiba]

Ha--I knew I'd take a bit of ribbing from the amd fans... Yes, I have a celery and I am perfectly happy with it. But I had to do a double take on your post, cause "celery" is actually the machine name I gave my PC! At first glance, I thought "how the hell did he know I called my machine celery???"

Is there a URL for the doomworld forums? Just doomworld.com? I've never been there. I'll try that tonight--can't do it right now from work.

Carbon, I've had the same feeling. I usually reinstall the OS about once a year anyway, but I really didn't think I needed to yet. As I said in my post, the machine has been running great for everything else, including video editing and even running older games like Half-Life.

Sideswipe, my mobo is a cheepie I got from Fry's, and no, I haven't updated the BIOS lately. That is also something to try.

Thanks for the ideas so far.

 

[Appledrop]

btw replace the celery with a northwood p4, (NOT a presscot) - the difference in gaming is absolutely amazing. (celerons have 128kb cache opposed to 512 - that makes a HUGE difference)