Possible conflict w/Exile games and NVMixerTray

[jeffmorse752]

I have been a fan of the Exile series since I

started playing the games on my old Compaq PC

several years ago. Well when I built my first

system, I tried the games again, this time from

the CDROMs I bought a few years ago on my last

system.

 

I began to have serious problems with the games

on my last PC, which was the first I built myself.

Windows would be so corrupted as to become unboot-

able after playing for a while (usually a few

hours), and the main sign this was going to

happen was the loss of all system sounds. So I

uninstalled them from it, and reverted back to

my old Compaq PC, which had working registered

shareware versions of all four games on it. It

used Windows 98SE.

 

A few weeks ago, I thought I would try the CDROMs

again, this time on my current system, which I

also homebuilt. Crossing my fingers that the

earlier problem wouldn't show up again, I jumped

right into Exile II. The problem sort of went

away. While I didn't get the OS corruption that

happened before, playing for a while knocked out

audio from media players (videos had no sound). I

would have to reboot.

 

Today while playing I got a weird registry space

low error message twice, once while playing

Exile III, and again after rebooting. I had just

gotten outside from my initial visit to Blackcrag

Fortress, and didn't want to lose any progress I

had made.

 

Then I remembered something else: NVMixerTray,

a control panel for NVidia's sound drivers that

sits in the system tray, wouldn't load after

videos lost sound, and if NVMixerTray was

clicked on after a fresh reboot, Exile III

would not load. So I disabled NVMixerTray in

MSConfig, and though it may be too soon to tell,

I think the problem has been resolved.

 

NVMixerTray is an application that is part of

the drivers for all nForce series motherboards,

and when these are installed or upgraded, it puts

itself in the registry to run at startup. It isn't

really needed, and in the case of the Exile games

(and perhaps others from Spiderweb Software),

appears to cause a resource conflict with them.