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I'm having a rather strange tech problem with Beyond the Sword. I'll explain how I found out later, but it only applies to BtS. Warlords and vanilla Civ IV work fine; I only have the problem if I start up BtS. The tech people at 2K seem stumped; I've had a tech request in with them for about 3 weeks now, and they still have no idea what's causing it. They have me trying all sorts of simple things that aren't making any difference at all. I'm hoping that some of you guys that play around with the source code might have some ideas.
Here's what's going on: if I start up BtS, I lose pretty much everything except the main display screen. I have no popup windows at all. In the main menu, I can't pull up Options or the Civilopedia, though the others work fine. In the game, I've got the main screen, but no popups, so no options, no Civilopedia, no advisors, no tech tree, no mini-map, nothing like that. I don't even get the little window at the beginning that tells me which civ/leader I have and which techs I start with.
I hadn't been playing Civ IV for a few months. I'd stopped a game I had all but wrapped up when Crysis came out, and between playing that a couple of times, a couple of games I borrowed from friends, and some other games I had the urge to play again, I didn't go back to Civ until about 3 weeks ago. When I did, I decided to start a new game and discovered this problem. I thought something had gone wrong, so I uninstalled the game and completely reinstalled it. Same problem. So I removed it completely, went into the registry, removed all the Firaxis keys, then reinstalled it. Same problem. I removed it, cleaned the registry, then installed it on my second hard drive in case the old files were a problem. Same trouble.
Then I removed it completely, cleaned the registry, then started installing it one game and patch at a time while checking after each install. Civ IV worked fine. It worked fine after I applied the patch. Warlords worked fine without a patch and with the patch. It was only when I installed BtS that the problem showed up. Further, when I started Warlords after installing BtS I found that Warlords still worked fine, it was only BtS that has the problem.
It so happened that the night before I went back to Civ IV I'd gone to Microsoft and installed a bunch of updates, because I hadn't run any in a while. One of those updates, the one I suspect might be the cause of the issue, is an update to XML 4.0, which is supposed to fix an exploit in Vista. I'm not running Vista, I'm running XP Professional, but it still showed up in the list of high priority updates so I installed it.
My question is this: does BtS handle XML files in a different way than the earlier versions? I've tried rolling back but it doesn't work, and I really don't want to reinstall Windows in an attempt to fix this. The tech guys at 2K won't answer the question, they just email me every couple of days with something new to try in order to "troubleshoot" it. The last one was disable all background applications in Msconfig, then restart and remove all files from the TEMP folder before running the game. Needless to say, the issue is unchanged. The current one (that I haven't go around to doing yet) is to uninstall the game, manually copy all the disks onto the hard drive, then reboot into safe mode and install from the hard drive. I'm quite certain this isn't going to make any difference either.
Any ideas?
Here's what's going on: if I start up BtS, I lose pretty much everything except the main display screen. I have no popup windows at all. In the main menu, I can't pull up Options or the Civilopedia, though the others work fine. In the game, I've got the main screen, but no popups, so no options, no Civilopedia, no advisors, no tech tree, no mini-map, nothing like that. I don't even get the little window at the beginning that tells me which civ/leader I have and which techs I start with.
I hadn't been playing Civ IV for a few months. I'd stopped a game I had all but wrapped up when Crysis came out, and between playing that a couple of times, a couple of games I borrowed from friends, and some other games I had the urge to play again, I didn't go back to Civ until about 3 weeks ago. When I did, I decided to start a new game and discovered this problem. I thought something had gone wrong, so I uninstalled the game and completely reinstalled it. Same problem. So I removed it completely, went into the registry, removed all the Firaxis keys, then reinstalled it. Same problem. I removed it, cleaned the registry, then installed it on my second hard drive in case the old files were a problem. Same trouble.
Then I removed it completely, cleaned the registry, then started installing it one game and patch at a time while checking after each install. Civ IV worked fine. It worked fine after I applied the patch. Warlords worked fine without a patch and with the patch. It was only when I installed BtS that the problem showed up. Further, when I started Warlords after installing BtS I found that Warlords still worked fine, it was only BtS that has the problem.
It so happened that the night before I went back to Civ IV I'd gone to Microsoft and installed a bunch of updates, because I hadn't run any in a while. One of those updates, the one I suspect might be the cause of the issue, is an update to XML 4.0, which is supposed to fix an exploit in Vista. I'm not running Vista, I'm running XP Professional, but it still showed up in the list of high priority updates so I installed it.
My question is this: does BtS handle XML files in a different way than the earlier versions? I've tried rolling back but it doesn't work, and I really don't want to reinstall Windows in an attempt to fix this. The tech guys at 2K won't answer the question, they just email me every couple of days with something new to try in order to "troubleshoot" it. The last one was disable all background applications in Msconfig, then restart and remove all files from the TEMP folder before running the game. Needless to say, the issue is unchanged. The current one (that I haven't go around to doing yet) is to uninstall the game, manually copy all the disks onto the hard drive, then reboot into safe mode and install from the hard drive. I'm quite certain this isn't going to make any difference either.
Any ideas?
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