Games on my computer not working...

[eyor]

Hmmm... I am experiencing an odd problem here. I bought The Sims a while ago, and just bought Unreal Tournament today. The Sims stopped working abruptly a month ago, and I figured the CD was scratched or something, and no matter what I did I could not get it to work. When I installed UT today, the exact same error popped up. The game doesn't even get to a splash screen or anything, it just says:

This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.
If the problem persists, please contact the program vendor.

And when I click on "Details..." it shows:

UNREALTOURNAMENT caused an exception 01H in module <unknown> at 0000:0042d3bc.
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=0028 EIP=0042d3bc EFLGS=00000297
EBX=0042d3b1 SS=0167 ESP=0067d9bc EBP=0067da08
ECX=0067da30 DS=0167 ESI=c0001350 FS=3dcf
EDX=c9b421a0 ES=0167 EDI=000000cf GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
89 45 e8 eb 06 8b 45 e8 0f 23 d0 0f 01 4d ec 8b
Stack dump:
00400000 bffa0405 0067da08 0067d9dc 00000001 c9b421a0 0067da30 00001010 00400000 bffa0405 00000001 00001010 0000015f 00000000 c00002ff 00008009

Does ANYONE have ANY CLUE at all as to what might have happened?
And I Think I have done all the obvious; Reinstalling 43 times, trying various settings and rebooting, closing all programs, and I meet the system requirements. What puzzles me is that The Sims abruptly stopped working. What could possibly be wrong? A system DLL file?
Thanks

 

[Dark4ng3l]

system specs?

 

[eyor]

AMD K6-2/333 processer w/ 3dNow
64 MB SDRAM
8 gig hdd

 

[rmblam]

What vid card?

What did you install or do a month ago?

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the sims and see if that fixes anything (actually uninstall bioth and start from stratch)
have you updated video card driver etc?

 

[eyor]

I think I mentioned that I did reinstall it already. And that is what confounds me blam, that I didn't make any changes to the computer when the sims stopped working. And I think the vid card is genero onboard hp. There are many logical things that I have thought of that might be the problem that are ruled out by the failure of other games.

 

[blurredvisionx]

Try reinstalling Windows. I know it's a drastic step, but I couldn't get a program to run whatsoever, but when I reinstalled Windows, it worked fine.

 

[eyor]

err... you mean format the drive? I am thinking a dll file may be corrupt here, so it may actually help to reinstall windows. But is it possible to lose nothing at all and just reinstall the windows system files?

 

[ItsmeItsme]

I think that you said that you have an hp. If you do use the first recovery disc, boot to it, go to advance options and do a selective recovery on *.dll

 

[eyor]

thanks, itsme! I'll give it a go.

 

[ItsmeItsme]

If that doesn't work you can try to do a recovery only. That may delete a few programs but it doesn't delete any data files. But make sure you unattach any third party equipment before doing that. You only want to leave your monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers attached while doing that or it might mess up the recovery.

 

[Paladinexe]

Check to see if system tools was installed. Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>System Information. Then click Tools for the pull down menu and run System File Checker. If there is a corrupt file you can extract a single file. (Unless HP disabled/sidestepped this feature).

 

[eyor]

thanks, the games load fine now. I did a full recovery, and it even solved some other problems I've been having. but, when I play unreal tournament, after a bit the character decides to hop up and down, lol. this only happens when I have a gun out. perhaps my vid card just isnt powerful enough to handle it? not a very big deal though, as I was mainly planning on using it with the highend gaming system I am building right now.