For all those having problems with the ntdll.dll

[GoJets!]

I hope this will help those of you encountering the same problems as me:
after a couple of minutes of campaign, skirmish or multiplayer gameplay, the game just crashes to the desktop, and you are to send a report (which of course won't function).
Here's what I did, after days and days of trial and error:
start dxdiag, go to sound and change the bar at the bottom to mininum hardware acceleration.
please excuse if I lack the adequate vocabulary, it's a bit hard to translate everything from german to english...

[NickCiao]

Thanks! I'll be testing this out as soon as I get home

*edit* Any idea why this fixes the problem?

[GoJets!]

I have absolutely no idea why....
I tried lots and lots of things, from vpu recovery on/off to agp 4x/8x, fastwrite on/off and write combining.
And then I changed the hardware acceleration, and bingo, for two complete days I didn't have any crashes...

Best of luck to you!

[Darth Z]

GoJets!, your vocabulary might not be perfect, but it's a lot better than a lot of people for whom English is their native language, so you're doing fine.

[NickCiao]

:( I tried it and it didnt' work for me. I reduced it to none, and to minimum settings. None of them worked and I still crash anywhere from 3-8 mins into a skirmish/campaign/multiplayer game.

Any other solutions? I checked my error log and the problem is also with ntdll.dll

[gesierfou]

Hello !
I have the same bug in this game, and i have testing my computer with bench during 75hours (SP2004 orthos mod) with nothing error !
So i think that is a problem with the game and a futur patch correct this problem....
I had tested all the tips in this forum without sucess !... I'm very sad of this !
PS: My config is Opteron 165 @ 2250mhz, 2048ddr pc 4000 gskill hv + 2x160go sata II hitachi hdd in raid0 + 2x250go sata IIhitachi hdd in raid 1 + plextor dvd-rw 750A on a DFI UT LANPARTY ULTRA D/G and with a 7900gt in pci express. !

[Shuma-Gorath]

Hmm... well, I doubt my sound card is DX9 compliant, so this would explain why I'm getting bad trapframes and other nonsense. Of course, the random blue screen I got while browsing the web last night is another matter.

Then again, DirectSound has barely changed since DX3.

[GoJets!]

Well, as I said, I've tried everything I could find in these forums, but nothing worked.
I had the same problems last year with Winter Assault, and read dozens of posts from the tech guys here. RAM problems might be a common threat, but I'm currently playing on two 512MB DDR333 sticks, from different manufactors and both are about two years old.
I even considered buying new RAM, but prices are way up high here in Europe and are expected to rise even more in November.
Onboard sound seems to be a major factor concerning the crashes (not the blue screens though :-), at least it worked for me. Perhaps disabling it in your BIOS would help, along with buying a PCI sound card.
But I'm no expert, I can only tell you what did it for me, after days and days of frustration.

[Shuma-Gorath]

I'm using PCI sound and have onboard off. Either way, I'll try it out later today.

[Shuma-Gorath]

No luck. With DXDiag's level at Basic and acceleration Off in my soundcard's drivers I get the insta-reboot crashes randomly, which means no memory dumps at all.

[ÜberJumper]

If any of you have bit defender v10 installed, try uninstalling it.

[gesierfou]

Yeeeees !
It's Bit defender crash the game !
Dark crusade and company of heroes work fine actually!
I had uninstall bit defender, it's work but when i install bit defender these two games crash !
The big probleme is that i'm not protected against virus now ! :-(

[NickCiao]

ugh no, i was afraid it'd be bit defender...

anyone suggest any other anti-viruses (besides norton...that program is such a system hog)? my university provides Sophos but I don't really know if that's any good or not.

[Darth Z]

I don't have Bit Defender, and I was crashing (until my bit with the RAM speed setting in BIOS, but you probably already read about that), so I don't think Bit Defender by itself is the culprit. It probably doesn't help, but it just seems to me that there's a deeper problem that needs to be patched.

[NickCiao]

yeah its' totally bitdefender 10 that was crashing it for me... I had to uninstall it to figure that out. It totally sucks that I have to get rid of my antivirus to play this game.

[gesierfou]

It's very bad, i can't play more than 10 minutes with bitdefender, it's so easy to caught virus and malicious program if i disable the antivirus !
Anyone have a good information about the future patch ?

[Shuma-Gorath]

Does it need to be disabled or uninstalled completely? You can always turn off the auto-protect when you want to play and turn it back on later. If you have a router or Windows firewall you'll be safe from any worms and you aren't running unknown programs while you play.

[gesierfou]

Dark crusade don't crash only when i uninstall completely !
It's so boring ! I have a routeur/firewall but i had disabled firewall because it's bad for game (it's the optical fiber sagem 3190w, beuuurk), so i'm protecting only by the antivirus/firewall software !
Gogogo the patch..;-)

[Crazygoat]

Hello to everyone and I apologize in advance for my not-so-good english and I hope we'll understand each other correctly. If you read a PDF file on bitdefender official website you can come across this

BitDefender antivirus technology is integrated in a diverse range of products from: Data Becker,
G Data, GFI, Hauri, Ipswitch, Laplink, Software 602, Bullguard, and others.

You can also try right click on bitdefender tray icon, left click show, leftclick antivirus tab, on shield tab click custom level, click [+] Exclude path from scan (applied to ALL LEVELS), left click New item, browse to the folder where Dark Crusade is installed, left click on it, left click on OK and again on the OK. I hope this was helpful, since I wrote this without even trying for it myself.
EDITED: Two missions finished without a crash, to tired to play more, but that was around 1 hour of gameplay. Thanks God.
2nd EDIT: It seems that if you set the compatability mod on the DarkCrusade.exe file to be Windows 98/Windows ME it will work, in a way, since the performance will drop a lot and the sound will start to stutter. Anyway, as my signature says...