Problems with Programs / Games Crashing

[jmfred]

Hello. I've been lurking for awhile trying to fix this problem to no avail. Still nothing and it's driving me nuts.

I'll be playing a game, either through Steam or standalone doesn't seem to matter, and all of a sudden "ProgramX has stopped working" and boom, back to the desktop. I have the same problem with my web browser, Google Chrome, crashing randomly like this, as well as the flash plugin when running online video.

It has happened to me in all games I've played with varying levels of frequency.

I've updated my drivers.
I've checked to make sure the CPU and GPU temperatures are stable.
I've run multiple passes of memtest on each stick of RAM.
I've spent hours browsing Steam support and other forums.
Nothing seems to work.

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
CPU: Intel i5 2500k
Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD65
RAM: 16 GB (4 x 4 GB) Micro Center DDR3 @ 1333MHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560
HD: an old Hitachi from my previous build
Case / PSU: Antec Sonata III

At this point I'd be happy just to log a solid half hour of Skyrim without having to deal with all the crashes.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[chriscornell]

Try nVidia's beta driver 290.53

I had the same problem with BF3 before I updated to the 290.53 driver, where I would get the 'BF3.exe has stopped working...' error.

http://uk.geforce.com/drivers/results/40627

 

[jmfred]

@ChrisCornell - Driver compatibility was my first thought as well, but updating to the 290.53 version driver had no discernible effect on the crashing issues.

Just a quick update, for those having similar problems, I did manage to solve it eventually. I used the Windows Event Viewer to note the information attached to each application crash, and noticed a pattern with the same exception being thrown again and again. The specific error I was getting as a 0xc0000005 exception connected to the ntdll.dll system module.

After doing some research on both of the mentioned malfunctions I figured the problem was memory-related, so I went into my BIOS and manually set the timings and voltage for the recommended levels (read your Motherboard's User Manual for the specifics). This has fixed the problem, and I have been running crash-free since.

 

[AntiZig]

yeah, a common problem is you typically want to set your timings manually, even though the boards detect memory automatically with so many brands and things floating around not all boards do a good job at configuring correctly.

Good job on figuring this one out yourself. Happy gaming.