mice flickers and regular CTD

Go into options and switch the cursor over to hardware cusrsor and not the game one. This should rectify the problem for you

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Tried it but doesn't solve anything. With hardware cursor active, mice pointer isn't visible unless you move it. When you do so, it flickers. And I'm still having regular CTD. Had 3 in a row in the last hour.

Anything else I should look into? Is this game known to have issue with ATI graphic card? I own a Radeon 9600, as shown in the debug.err, and I'm using Dec 2005 drivers 6.14.0010.6587

You should look into making sure those are the latest drivers for your card. I dont know about ATI but Nvidia has put out 3 already in '06.

I seriously doubt that. There is a new release for Catalyst 6.3 for March 2006. However, the Radeon 9600 is a card that's been on the market for 2-3 years, if not more. I will try the new drivers, but I don't think this will resolve my issues. This package is more intended for the newer cards. The package is backward compatible for older card like the Radeon but I doubt ATI is spending of lot of dev/support hours for Radeon specific issues. I've checked the released notes and there is no reference to galciv2 or any bugs that ressemble mine.

In my original question, I was trying to asses if other ATI users are having issues with galciv2? Civ4 had numerous problems with ATI cards, and it still does. I'm curious if it's the same thing with galciv2.

This is a real problem for me. These CTD are a total turnoff. I actually quit playing Civ4 after a month of regular CTD because I was never able to fix it. I don't want the same thing to happen to galciv2.

I appreciate all help and suggestions to help me resolve my issue.

"I don't think it will help, therefore I will never try it, despite when others tell me it very well might help" is rarely the path to fixing your problem.

BTW, GC2 hasn't bene out long at all. Certainly not long enough for it to have specific notes in drivers. BTW, newer drivers from both ATI and nVidia do help older cards too. They're still the same basic architcture as the newer cards, just less so.

People have had CTDs from old sound drivers as well. Your are 3 years old. You should really update both sets of drivers just to rule them out. Also, your debug.err ends on "Finished auto save." I highly recommend turning off the auto save feature in your options menu, as some others have posted CTDs during/after auto saves. Also, you might try updating to the 1.1 Beta, but that is entirely up to you. Okay, to sum up:

-Update the two old drivers
-Turn off auto save feature
-Upgrade to 1.1 Beta (optional)

My money is on the auto-save feature for the CTD and the drivers for mouse flicker. Good luck.
-HEEGZ

Just to give some feedback on this problem:

Mouse cursor flicker: when I started having crashes, I changed my setting for hardware acceleration. I had read somewhere that this could help resolve crashes. You can access these via Control Panel -> Display icon -> Settings tab -> Advanced Button -> Troubleshoot tab. I moved the setting 2 notch at the left from Full Hardware acceleration. This IS the source of my mouse flicker problem. I reset these settings to full and i DON'T have any mice problems anymore. So everyone, be carefull about changing these settings on a whim, like I did. My bad.

I then went back to the basics. I know I wrote CTD implying a crash-to-desktop, but this was not really what was happening to me. I was having a blue screen crash, and not a CTD. This is an important difference. A CTD implies the program failing and exiting with error, without causing problem to the OS. This usually implies faulty programming and bugs. A blue screen implies a memory issue since the whole computer fails. This can happen due to faulty devices or faulty drivers for those devices.

In the past, a year ago to be precise, I had problem with my RAM. We usually don't need to go into the bios to configure the settings for our hardware. In my case, that wasn't true anymore. My RAM settings were all set to AUTO, as they should since everything is plug-and-play now. Last year, I had to manually set all the RAM settings to their specifications in order to resolve my crashes. In theory this shouldn't have changed anything but it did.

This made me thinking, what if I was having RAM problems again? So I went back to my bios and reduced the performance settings for my RAM. I increase for CAS from 2 to 3, my RAS from 2 to 3, etc... Bingo! I haven't had a blue screen crash since then. Of course, the side effect is my computer is now running below specs. But at least, it's not crashing.

So I might have resolved my blue screen crash issue. This weekend will be crucial since this is the time I play most. By next monday, I'll post some more to keep you guys posted. Maybe this will inspire some of you to do similar testing on your PC, especially the one experiencing blue screen crashes.

Lastly, about my old sound drivers, those are the lastest available for my device. I'm using an integrated chipset on my M/B for sound, in case you're wondering.

Way to track that down. Hope you have a good weekend of gaming

If you want to manually test your RAM and have a spare CD go Here and download an iso burn the IMAGE to disc, reboot, set your bios to boot from CD and let it run for about 3 repetitions, any errors at all means you're timings are out of whack or the RAM itself is whacked.
I've got the 9600 card as well but the XT model with the 6.3 drivers w/o CCC but the old 5.9 or 5.11(can't remember) control panel lol and it doesn't crash at all except about 25% of the time when re-entering the game after alt tabbing out of it, or trying to save an obsolete or previously deleted ship design with the same name as one in the savegame file.

Update on this topic: After playing a good 6h last weekend, it seems my bug is resolved. I haven't crashed a single time. So the problem was with the ram.

About the memory test, I will try it out next weekend. Too busy right now with other aspects of life that doesn't involve pc gaming Last year, I used that exact test to confirm my problem: when I was using the auto settings for my ram, I had problems during the tests. When I ran with factory settings, it ran fine. Next weekend, I'll try the test with factory settings again and see if I get any problems. If that's the case, I will contact tech support and see what they can do. At least, I was able to find a short term solution but it would be nice to use factory settings (2-2-2-5) with my ram, which really gives a nice boost to overall performance. Especially for those 3D shooters.