UT Freezing/Loss of Control

After you crash, if you take a look at your unrealtournament.log, you can often see what it was having a problem with... Try to look at it BEFORE you restart UT as sometimes the log appends that existing file with the new game info and other times, it deletes that file and starts a new one, so you miss what happened before.

Do you have something like an antivirus program running in the background? Sometimes something like that will see some binary file from UT that it's confused about and will start scanning it...

p.s. I am having my own issues with the 43x versions of UT, but that's another story altogether. I have 1 machine with a V2-1000 (win2K), one with a V3-2000 (linux), and a 3rd (full install but used as a server only on win98) with an S3 Virge w/4MB video RAM (LOL), which I *don't* play on....heh

The only other thing that jumps out at me is the fact that you say you have DirectX 8 installed and I know that I've seen both here and on other UT/gaming forums where people are screaming about it.

You might try to uninstall it and put 7 back. From what I understand, doing that might be a bit of a nightmare (I think they must have been referring to getting rid of it in the registry and other places where it sticks itself). If no one else can come up with anything else, you can give that a shot...

Okay - another thing is that you don't list a sound card (or on-board sound chip). If you do have one, there could be some interference going on - especially with certain ones that I've heard people complain about, eg., anything using Aureal 3D drivers. That could be causing the freezing problem. Your machine specs sound almost like one of my UT boxes, which is a Compaq Presario with a K6-2/450, 156MB RAM, & win98. I have an S3 Virge vid card in it.

Going back to the video... you can also try going to 3DFX's site and getting the most updated vid card drivers...

The other thing that folks might tell you to do as the most drastic measure is to either defrag your 98 or reinstall it clean. I am definitely not a fan of windud but if all else fails...

Okay... how about this... Any power management things enabled? Also, what type of hard drive (also, is it AT66 or something)?

It almost feels like like you're running into a situation where you get to a scene and the machine is scrambling around trying to display it... Have you noticed whether your hard drive light goes steady when it freezes like that?

Also, is your machine "generic" or is it a name brand box?

Just going through the motions here that might prompt me to fix my own random pauses and lockups (although in most cases, the lockups are temporary not needing a boot...).

If you go into Control Panel, you'll find an icon for Power Management. Some of the settings in there include cutting off the monitor after x minutes and powering down the hard drive after x minutes of inactivity. If you have alot of RAM (which you do) and most of the stuff the program needs is sitting in that RAM, then generally, it won't need to go to the hard drive to get the data, so the hard drive becomes inactive. BUT... if all of a sudden you need stuff from the hard drive and the Power Management setting was set for the HD to spin down after say 5 minutes of inactivity AND it's inactive, THEN the program tries to access a hard drive that's basically asleep. That means a delay while your computer starts spinning the drive back up again so that it can fulfill the request.

Power management is great for notebooks, especially when running on a battery because a constantly spinning drive uses up the battery power, but if you're trying to play a game like UT where it needs to access that drive constantly, then yeah... you'll get pauses that are almost like lockups while the program waits for the drive to spin up enough to get the data. That's what it sounds like when you say you can hit <ATL><TAB> a billion times and FINALLY it'll respond. I think by default, 98 enables Power Management if the motherboard supports it.

The other thing is that although alot of folks have WD drives, I've heard alot of complaints about them failing. I don't think this is your case but it's something to think about.