Well I moved over to Windoze 7. It works much better than vista, thankfully. Also SC4 seems like it doesn't have any problems with it. I downloaded a whole bunch of plugins, which was when SC4 began crashing. I ran the Cleanitol files and dismissed that as a plugin conflict. Now weeks later, after enough custom downloads to cap off my bandwidth, it crashes again. Five minutes after I start my city up. (Or rural outskirts. Whatever.)
I really don't know what caused it that time. I didn't download much after the past 2 hour run of SC4, so again I checked my plugins. This time I thought that the DAMN menus (not the ingame ones; its the ones you can find on SC4D) were the problem and messed up my game. So I deleted them. Just delete the whole folder and anything that had to do with it. Alas, I should've ran SC4 after that to see if that was the problem, but I didn't. So I left SC4 for a week.
I downloaded...actually quite a fair bit, but it was mostly new stuff and I ran many a Cleanitol file. Also I followed a few tutorials to customize my SC4. Tonight I was trying to help someone with an unrelated issue, but I accidentally clicked on the SC4 shortcut, and I decided that I left SC4 for too long and I was quite bored. But this time, THE VERY MOMENT I CLICK THE PLAY BUTTON TO LOAD UP A TOWN...it crashes.
Alright, 5 minutes was bad, but this!? Even before it has a chance to load up a city!? What did I do wrong this time?
Just to recap what I did:
- First crash (way back).
- Ran cleanitol files. Found a few conflicts and deleted most of them.
- Downloaded a gob of plugins. Most of them worked every time I started the program. And believe me, I was starting it up about once a day for two weeks.
- Second crash (week before).
- Deleted (not uninstalled since the readme didn't have uninstall instructions) the most recent plugins. The DAMN menus one.
- Also ran cleanitol files.
- Downloaded a reasonable amount of plugins. Unfortunately many of them didnt have cleanitol files.
- Downloaded SC4DatPacker. Initially compressed one folder in the plugins to a single file, but upon reading the readme I deleted the file and left my original folder back in its place.
- Decided 'right, my plugin folder is a mess' and moved stuff everywhere, plus a few textures, mods, mega packs and the like to the Program Files plugin folder.
- Followed a tutorial on Simtropolis to get a custom background. Used the same image on all four zooms.
- Third crash.
IMO, I think my shifting to the program files plugin folder is the problem but I'm afraid to move everything back or I might ruin SC4 some more. My SC4 was originally very unstable and crashed quite a bit, even without plugins...buut I dunno. What should I do?