How to run a pbem in Win 7

[Mobhack]

Never heard of this happening to anyone in 10+ years of development. Any problems with a PBEM file would normally be seen as the game barfing on attempting to load the turn.

First - turn off the splash screen in the game options Main tab (Show Introduction : No)

If that lets your game proceed, then you have the same problem with DirectPlay that some folk have noted, happens after one of the latest Microsoft XP updates, may affect Vista/7. It can be intermittent on some machines apparently. It seems to be a video codec problem and may be fixed by now. (Try going to the Microsoft update site, if you do not have automatic updates turned on.). That is the only "freeze on splash screen" error we have had reported. In any case, turning off the splash screen saves a few seconds in game loading (default on my machine is off).

Second - try deleting those suspect PBEM files. If the game now starts OK then there might be a problem wih your files there, though as I said - it is highly unlikely that this would stop the game itself.

If the second option makes the game run - I'll assume bad file problems.

Possibilities:

A) User error
- Have you unzipped the files or unRARed them to the correct place?. (Hopefully your opponent has not simply sent the files as raw uncompressed attachments - mail programmes and anti-virus can nuke dat files).

- Are you getting RAR files from your opponent - if so then make sure you have the exact same RAR programme as he does. Different RAR programmes can have problems with each other, it seems. Best to use ZIP compression, it is reliable.

- Is your opponent playing the same game as you?. Some end users do get confused and try to send WinSPWW2 files to a WinSPMBT player or vice-versa. Also - some folk seem to think SP:WaW is our game and exchange PBEM files (or apply our patches to that game - the same happened in the old DOS days, when folk tried applying our patches to SSI's products)

B) Computer problems
You may have disk problems. How long since you have de-fragmented your hard drive?. Try that with "automatically fix problems" or however Windows 7 phrases it. If it has been a long while, then do a sector scan of the HD surface for bad sectors (an overnight job).

Once that is done, extract the files once again, especially if you got bad clusters or dead hard disk sectors reported.

Andy