VOGONS

WtF, M$?

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First post, by Gamecollector

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Some time ago my main retro rig have started freezing with ddraw/d3d/ogl applications. As the example - DOSBox, ePSXe etc.
Error code 000000ea, parameters 89caa4c8, 89ca9248, 89c5a960, 00000001.
As I can see from dumps - the reason is THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER in ati2cqag.dll.
Well, the first fix was to remove all startup programs. No crash after this.
And the summary: there is no crash if there is no Skype in the background.
WtF, Microsoft?
Have downgraded to 7.0.85.100. Lets see the result...
P.S. Of course any bug report will be trashed because of "WinXp is dead" and "Pentium 4 is dead".
P.S.S. No freeze with 7.0.85.100. Maybe later I will try to catch the last working version number...

Last edited by Gamecollector on 2015-08-01, 13:17. Edited 2 times in total.

Asus P4P800 SE/Pentium4 3.2E/2 Gb DDR400B,
Radeon HD3850 Agp (Sapphire), Catalyst 14.4 (XpProSp3).
Voodoo2 12 MB SLI, Win2k drivers 1.02.00 (XpProSp3).

Reply 1 of 5, by Gemini000

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Skype gets worse by the day. I abandoned it and switched to Steam's interface over a year ago and haven't looked back.

Previously, I used an old version which wasn't suffering massive ad bombardments. Then one day I tried to boot it up and it immediately logged me out saying my version was too old. >_>;

So I tried updating... ended up getting massive amounts of ads on every single window, system resources were getting consumed beyond reasonable levels, and to top it off, just trying to type a message into a chat window was messing up because it was MISSING KEYSTROKES. >_<;

The day I heard Microsoft was buying Skype I told everyone I knew personally that this was a really bad sign for Skype's future... Apparently, I wasn't mistaken. :(

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Reply 2 of 5, by smeezekitty

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Still looks like an ATI driver bug is at least part of the problem. In theory, normal graphics applications shouldn't be able to take down a graphics driver.
However, will all the speed optimizations and such, there are flaws

Reply 3 of 5, by VileR

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Skype was always a badly-coded exercise in system instability. On my previous setup, having Skype running would completely prevent Apache from starting (I've stopped running Apache locally because I no longer have to, but I wouldn't be surprised if the problem is still there).
I still have to use Skype unfortunately (work-related reasons), but on my new rig I installed a portable version... and I should probably be running it sandboxed, too.

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Reply 4 of 5, by gerwin

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This Skype V7.6+ on XP problem is a real bitch, for anyone who happens to try this combination. I don't really use Skype myself (One of those cheap VOIP services works better for me), but some people around me had this issue. Posted about it here:
Vogons: Sticking with XP a smart move?
and here:
Skype Community: Skype 7.6 causes instability on Windows XP SP3

Latest insight:
Tools -> Options -> IM & SMS -> IM appearance
only disable "Show animated emoticons"
confirm and restart Skype

No official response from microsoft anywhere, just a useles v7.7 update. The main Skype page still lists XP as a suitable OS.

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Reply 5 of 5, by Gamecollector

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gerwin wrote:

Tools -> Options -> IM & SMS -> IM appearance
only disable "Show animated emoticons"

Tnx.

Asus P4P800 SE/Pentium4 3.2E/2 Gb DDR400B,
Radeon HD3850 Agp (Sapphire), Catalyst 14.4 (XpProSp3).
Voodoo2 12 MB SLI, Win2k drivers 1.02.00 (XpProSp3).

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