Skyrim won't launch. CPU pegged at 100%.

LTDansen

Honorable
Jan 12, 2014
5
0
10,510
Ok, so I've been all around the internet trying to find somebody who might be able to help me with my issue; so here it is.

When I click "Play" on the Skyrim launch menu I just get the swirly twirlly blue circle for windows and I can see my resource monitor report all cores smashed at 100% usage, memory usage is unfazed at ~3GB of 16, disk and network usage is minimal. I'll grab a picture of the screen (literal) if anybody thinks it would help rather than taking my word for it.

I've removed all DLC, all Workshop Mods, steam keeps the game updated, I've updated all drivers, the installation is fresh, and the Game Cache has been verified. I've gone through and made sure that I've got PhysX, DirectX, 32bit C++ and 64bit C++ installed per the trouble shooting guide.

DxDiag

Any help would be appreciated as I've upgraded this machine and wanted to get back and finally finish me some Skyrim... now this.
 

neieus

Distinguished
You mention that when you try to load Skyrim your CPU goes to 100%. I would assume that's Skyrim using all the CPU resources but have you tried looking at task manager to verify that all of your cores are being used on the same thing?
 

LTDansen

Honorable
Jan 12, 2014
5
0
10,510
So a bit of fortune for us in this, I didn't really like that I was having to force shut down with the power button to get out of the testing so I set a hotkey on my keyboard to send the normal windows shutdown command. I opened up Resource Manager and Task Manager and gave your research idea a go. I found that it was not one but a cloning of the same process over and over and over, Ekag20.nt.exe. In a change to my previous statement, I also watch after about 3 minutes of this that my memory usage did in fact begin to climb, until it was completed consumed as well.

I used the hotkey to execute the shutdown command (pressing a couple times) and suddenly as the computer began shutting down I was bombarded with error messages I never got before.

"A required .DLL file, EKC3220.DLL, was not found"
"Out of memory in_setargv0"

There were 10s of these each, I'm assuming one for each of the 1% cpu using clones of EKag20nt.exe
 

LTDansen

Honorable
Jan 12, 2014
5
0
10,510
Alrighty, these error messages were exactly what I needed to solve the problem.

The problem lay with Virtu MVP. I had not thought to update that driver as I was going through the rest of my hardware. Integrated driver support for my motherboard slipped my mind. An update to the latest version seems to have solved the issue. No more spike, Skyrim loads up and I've got a game started.