Lots of POL crashes...

[Thistle]

I'm not a very technical person, so sorry if I leave something important out.

In the past few months, POL has been crashing in two different ways, and it's becoming more frequent.

1) POL/FFXI just vanishes, *poof!* no error message or anything, it's just gone.
2) A real error message, with the following windows:

http://www.hot-hot-hot-catlove.com/ffxi/POL_error.jpg
Clicking the 'click here' leads to:

http://www.hot-hot-hot-catlove.com/ffxi/POL_error2.jpg
Clicking 'vew tech. info' leads to:

http://www.hot-hot-hot-catlove.com/ffxi/POL_error3.jpg

I'm not sure why the third screenshot lists me as NT. I'm on Windows XP Home.

My machine isn't that new anymore (two years-ish?) but that's not horribly old either.

I use the unofficial Windower and just a couple plugins.

I haven't noticed any patterns to the crashes. Could happen right after starting the machine up, could be fine all day. My apartment is almost always very cool (today it's only 68 outside and nearly that cool inside and it crashed three times) so I don't think it could be overheating?

Any ideas what I could do about this? Or is it something I'll just need to put up with? I hate always being worried I'll crash during some big fight or at the end of Besieged or something...

Edit: Hey, I just noticed in the second screenshot, distance.dll. Could the plugin be causing it? It's really handly, but I'd happily give it up to stop the crashes. (It is the latest version of it.)

[SamanosukeShiva]

could try to disable it from the init.txt

then try play game w/o it if you stop crashing then yeah....

[Shuemue]

Yeah, try playing without distance for a while, see if that helps, if you still crash, come back and we'll try something else.

[Thistle]

Will do, thanks!

[Norellicus]

I had trouble with Distance crashing not too long ago. Tried just reinstalling the DLL but it still crashed; ultimately just backed up my screenshot and macro folders, and reinstalled all of windower from scratch. Haven't had an issue since.

Also:

I'm not sure why the third screenshot lists me as NT. I'm on Windows XP Home.

Windows XP is more traditionally known as NT version 5.1. At its core, it's still Windows NT, just a lot more userfriendly than the older varieties.

http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:..._you_know2.jpg

[Shuemue]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure 2k, 2k3 also show up as NT. Probably to do with the file system, NTFS.

[Akucaen]

2k was WINNT5, XP NT5.1, 2k3 5.2, Vista is NT6 "technically", but has adopted "Windows 6"

[Thistle]

As a quick FYI, in case anyone does a search and finds this thread: While bored during the downtime I visited the Windower site to make sure that my distance.dll was in fact the latest. I saw that my Windower itself was one step behind (3.3 instead of 3.4) and saw this:

3.3 had a MAJOR bug in its code that was causing plugins to randomly crash, behave incorrectly or downright cause the game to crash. This bug has been remedied 100% and now is now perfectly stable.

So hopefully upgrading to 3.4 will fix this issue! I feel stupid for not checking that, but I trust Windower more than I do Windows, so I was expecting it to be something Windows-related.

---

Windows XP is more traditionally known as NT version 5.1. At its core, it's still Windows NT, just a lot more userfriendly than the older varieties.

Oh, that's interesting to know!

[The_OG_Nelta]

this has happen to me as well, found out it was Distance plugin.

[Reality]

I'm having the same issue as the OP, in that the game will start loading to the Accept/Decline screen, and then vanish. I can play the game windower-less, but with all of my macros being scripts, there's really no point in me playing the game unless I can get windower to work right

It does this in 3.3 and 3.4, with or without any plugins autoloaded

edit: fixed, was because of Media Center Receiver service, have to stop it before i start FFXI, then can start it after the game has loaded. what a crock..

[Wolfknight]

didn't want to make new topic since similar giving the same thing, but it is says in the view error this instead of Distance.dll:
AppName: pol.exe AppVer: 1.18.7.0 ModName: ffximain.dll
ModVer: 3.0.0.0 Offset: 0006d12f

Been causing me to get stuck in random zones and then work later randomly, any advice on how to fix this would be great, I am just running windower 3.4 and few plugins, I tried stopping distance but that didn't help.

edit: it seems to happens when I try to open something like ls, trade, or talking to some npcs after it's happened once.

[Ninjadik]

I used to have this problem as well. I //unload distance every time i /shutdown now. I also took it off autoload in the init.ini and I can shutdown fine now.