JayCeeBee64 wrote:swaaye wrote:Does anyone else have 98SE and ME frequently blow up after quitting a D3D game? BSOD, ddhelp, kernel32 errors, etc. It seems to be caused by installing DirectX 8 and later and especially but not limited to NV cards. If I stick to DirectX 7 and older all is fine. OpenGL games are also less troublesome. I've been exploring this issue for years, across various hardware and software combinations.
Only time the ddhelp error came up frequently is when I botched up upgrading my SBLive! drivers and ended up creating double entries just about everywhere. Faced with the choice of either clean up the registry or reinstall Windows from scratch, I went for the registry clean up. It took a while, but got it done and after a proper SBLive! reinstall Win98SE behaved itself once again.
I've seen these problems with Live, Audigy, Seismic Edge, Vortex 2, and probably other sound cards too. It may indeed be caused by sound sometimes though. Homeworld stopped crashing the OS on exit when I pulled the sound card. I was using Homeworld's OpenGL.
NV drivers may be a primary cause, but I've had problems with ATI too. It's just that I found ddhelp crash forum threads going back to Geforce 256 so it sounds like NV was more problematic. One suggestion was to reinstall DirectX because of possible DLL hell, but that doesn't seem to help. Another common suggestion is the age-old "update drivers" but I've tried most of the drivers released from 2000-2006 🤣.
When you get to 2001 and later, people start migrating to XP and so it's harder to find discussion.
The only definite solution I've found is that remaining at or below DirectX 7.0a means no problems with crashes after quitting a game.
