Chris O

Interesting- in follow up to this post, I updated my NVIDIA GPU driver (didn't delete any drivers, just the one update, and no other changes) and then tried logging in, and was successful. Notably, the NVIDIA driver seemed to need an update as one was downloaded and installed; I didn't get the message that I was already running the latest driver, as I have since then. I was able to play for about one hour until I ran into a couple of bugs, causing the game to crash (the computer also restarted, but no blue screen). I was able to log back in after the first crash, play a little more, and then it crashed again, and this time wouldn't restart. (I can write more on these crashes because interesting things were happening in game, implying a problem was coming.) This seemingly implies that there's a GPU related problem, but perhaps more at work as well.

Update: I've been running my game successfully since Monday, playing probably 15 hours since then with no problems (except one time when Steam apparently crashed causing the game to crash, but I was able to log back in immediately and play "offline")... until this morning when Windows imposed an update on me. The moment after the computer restarted following the update, I got the very same error message again when I tried to relaunch the game. Again, so far the only change I've made since I initially posted was switching on the "hardware accelerated gpu scheduling". I'm going to start taking a look at removing/disabling the Asus software as recommended above.

Interesting, and thank you for the feedback above. In fiddling around with my computer and checking the settings, I noted that "hardware accelerated gpu scheduling" was turned off. I'd never heard of this feature before, so I quickly read up on it and opted to try playing the game while it's set to "On". So far, the game has been running well, with no crashes. Could it be this simple?

That's the make of my Mobo as well as my GPU, so that doesn't seem like such a straight forward thing. Is this a known problem?

I posted about six months ago this thread which referred to the above error message. That thread was ended with me thinking I'd solved the problem, but I didn't. The problem boils down to one or two outcomes: 1) (Most common) For long stretches of time, I simply cannot start 7DtD. During the load screen, I'll get a pop-up error message (see image) which indicates the application can't start. Trying again, even after a computer reboot, and even after uninstalling and reinstalling the program, does nothing to fix the issue. 2) The game is able to load, but at some point simply freezes, sometimes to the point that the computer restarts on its own (maybe, but not always, with the "blue screen of death"), or sometimes with other windows opening and continuing to function. Occasionally after this, I can successfully restart the game, but often not. My system specs should be more than capable of handling 7DtD (see image), and I even increased my RAM from 16GB to 32GB thinking that maybe this was the issue, but nothing changed. As stated above, rebooting the computer doesn't solve anything, nor does uninstalling and reinstalling. I'm out of ideas. On occasion, seemingly at random, the game will load fine and I can play it... until I can't (when it freezes). Then it goes back to long periods where I can't even load it. At one point I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Easy Anti-Cheat thinking that maybe that was conflicting with my anti-virus (Trend Micro), but that caused the program to not load at all, which forced me to reinstall the whole thing. Anyway, Help! I do love playing this game, quirks and all, so it's very frustrating to essentially not be able to. I'm honestly at the point where I'd love to talk to a human being at Fun Pimps about how to fix this. Thanks for any more ideas you can come up with.

Update (literally): after having these sorts of problems in this and other games, I opted to update my Windows 10 to Windows 11. The problems resolved.

I got the above Application Error when I tried to run the game: "The Application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000005)" It's fully updated through Steam, and the error persisted even after uninstalling and reinstalling the game. There are no mods on it. Any ideas on how to fix this? This is especially weird to me as I played the game successfully without bugs just a week ago.