As it turns out, that was the problem! The third save was set to normal fleets/resources/etc when they had been fast and large prior. It's good to know this is known cause it had me befuddled.

My friend continues having minidump issues even after reducing his graphics settings. I suppose I could try reducing mine, but the game runs perfect 99% of the time at full settings. The only time it lags like a mother is when the advent bubble ships are present.

I found another oddity in the game. The phasic stuff seems to turn off my buildings! Now this is fine and good when being attacked in preservation is needed, but they remained off long after there were no longer threats in the area. This caused several of my planets to "turn" because the media centers were off. It would be nice if they would automatically go phased when they are being attacked and only when they are being attacked. Things like frigate factories and hanger bays are needed when the planet is being attacked and should not shut off. Anyway, I hope this gets resolved because trying to manage 50 planets with their media centers and such shutting down and staying shut down is really annoying.

Thanks again for letting me know about that bug! 1.04 FTW!

Got an odd runtime error last night. Game locked up and window came up saying runtime error. No other information.

As for the minidumps, what am I supposed to send? I dont see any log files or such. Maybe I'm just missing something. The minidump window doesnt give any more info then "minidump error" and an "ok" button.

Finally, after a while the side scrolling seems to lock up. Now I've attributed this problem to zooming way out and scrolling to one of the sides as far as the game limits. Then zooming in prevents movement in the adjacent 3 directions, but the opposite direction can be moved in. It's really odd and annoying. Anyway, better to post things then not.

Thanks!

Normally it would, but this one just comes up as a "Visual Studio C++" that says "runtime error..." and no links or file paths to speak of. It only tells me that there was an error and nothing about the error specifically. It's an oddity in Vista that I've seen a few times on different programs (not the same error, but the fact that it comes up with a window telling me that there was an error).

Any other suggestions?

Nope, no mods.

nono, I know, I've gotten 2 different errors at different times. One says minidump and the other is the C++ runtime error.

We are both using nvidia drivers which may be the issue. Unfortunately this OS was through HP or whatever and it wont let me update drivers directly for some odd reason. I go to install driver and it just crashes out saying it cant install.

But anyway, the minidump only seems to happen at an autosave. I know this because the prior autosave is almost exactly 15 mins before the crash which seems to be the frequency of the autosave.

Runtime error seems to happen about the same time, but in place of the minidump. It's wierd. Anyway, we'll see how 1.04 works.

Let me relate my experience here.

1. Playing with 3 IT professionals, 1 network engineer (myself), 1 systems engineer, 1 desktop support.
2. 2 of the systems are Q6600 quad cores and 1 an E6750.
3. I am running XP SP2, one running Vista Ultimate SP1, one running Vista Home SP1.
4. We all love sins and have had so many issues that one of us sold his two NVIDIA cards and got a an ATI 3870. Now all 3 of us have ATI 3870's.
5. All of us have 4 gig of ram although mine is limited by XP to 3.25.
6. We kill all tasks save Ventrillo and Sins during all gaming attempts.
7. We Minidump EVERY GAME. EVERY GAME. Our systems admin goes through the mindumps and scans them. I check the network/firewall. We all put ourselves in the DMZ. We have tried on Ironclad online, we have tried on the LAN with all of us bringing our PC's, and we have tried via hamachi.
8. This game is seriously flawed. None of us have found a solution and we are all in the field with seperate areas of expertise. We all love this game and desperately want to play it, are all fans of Stardock's ethos and prior games.

That said, we all find it intolerable that we cannot get this game to work regardless of our expertise levels and methods tried. One of us actually dumped money to get an ATI card just to get this game to work. Here we sit waiting weeks and we are still unable to play after paying for a game that should work. Meanwhile I'm seeing the focus of the patches on game balance and such when there are huge quantities of users that simply cannot play the game that have made great efforts to play it. I know that stardock is working on it but they should be shifting all of their efforts to ironing out their multiplayer bugs at this stage. Here comes the third week in a row that we want to get together and play this game that we have spent days of time troubleshooting, replaced hardware over, etc. and we are unable to do so. I am rapidly losing faith in Stardock/ICO over this. If someone can tell me something else that we can try I would be game...but at this point I will have to say that our collective assessment is that the game is broken in multiplayer period. Please prove me wrong so that I can stop being frustrated and get on with playing this great game.

Yes, my compatriots submitted Minidumps. Seeing that we have waited 3 weeks and no 1.4...and 1.4 isn't even addressing the issues...how many months are we expected to wait to play a game we purchased at release? As a purchaser of a game what should my expectation be? 1.1 could be a month or month(s) out. Is this all acceptable?

I agree with shaft as well. I kinda think im getting the shaft by not see any results for some big issues

Minidumps are not limited to Nvidia powered systems. I have an ATI card, and I minidump in every single game as well. I'm a Computer Science major, the best I can do right now is to send information to the developers, so they may fix it in a future patch.

same problems since yesterday ... got mini dumps crash after every auto save -.-

To add fuel to the fire, I'm having exactly the same issue. The group (5 players) that I play with have stopped playing the game for this reason! Not sure how something this blatant got past QA. If this is a know issue, which I can't see how it isn't, it is appalling to me to see that a crash is being put aside to balancing issues. A balanced game does me no good if I can't finish it, which I haven't yet. I bought this game the day it was released and I have yet been able to complete a MP game. I bought the game for the sole purpose of playing it as a MP game, and I can't! Even a FAQ acknowledging that there is a problem and stating some sort of activity would be nice. It annoyed me at first how games like Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes released patches on a weekly if not daily basis to address issues, but I have grown to appreciate the proactive effort to provide a stable game. All I hear are crickets over and IC. The fact that something like this has been allowed to go on for two months is ridiculous. To make us wait till 1.1, assuming they even address it at all is deceptive and just plain stupid.

Are you that naive Annatar? Do you honestly think that this problem is limited to the people that have posted in this forum? Its the nature of the beast? Maybe for IC.. If it was happening just to me, sure, I understand. But for every one person that posts to a forum, typically there is a much larger number of people this problem is affecting. Is IC offering to refund my money, because if they are I will take it in a second. I would also like to see this issue addressed. BTW, sitting down and fixing a bug can happen over night, I have done it on many occasions.