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I think you were onto something as regards the internal temperature. I noticed that when I played PoE and SWTOR for a short period, the internal temp rapidly went up to 78 degrees Fahrenheit (26 Celcius). When I was just surfing the net, it was down to about 23 degrees Celcius. So, I opened up the tower and used some compressed air to clean out the dust (I had not cleened it in about 6 months). I also left the tower open in order to better ventilate the CPU. After playing both SWTOR and PoE for awhile, the temp is still only at 23-24 degrees Celcius. I'm gonna try this for awhile and see if it keeps the temp down. I'll post if I have any issues.

Ok, I did as you said and found no disk errors. Just for the heck of it, I tried to re-load the last saved game that crashed my PC the time before....voila!....it loaded just fine this time. I then went to the inn and created a 4th party member (the same one I created before). This time it did not crash my PC. I left the inn and saved the game. I then exited the game, because I don't have time to play tonight, but I had no crashes. I don't understand why it was crashing before and not now. Of course, we'll see what happens as I continue to get further into the game. With my old character, my PC was not crashing much until I got to a certain point, then I couldn't load any of my games. I'll try again when I get home from work tomorrow and see if everything works during a period of extended gameplay. Oh. thank you for all your help/advice...I truly appreciate it.

It may be that I need a new video card. Do you think that is the issue? I submitted mt specs earlier in the post and no one said anything, so that lead me to believe my card is fine for running the game. I'm beginning to wonder if that is the issue. I have the latest drivers and I have "optimized" the game for PoE.

I uninstalled PoE and re-installed it. I effectively loaded my "next-to-the-last-save". I then went to the inn, rested, and saved my game. Amazingly, it allowed me to reload my last save. I was so excited; I thought it might be fixed. I then created a new character at the inn to join my party. I had just finished character creation and was looking through my inventory to equip him with a weapon and shield when it crashed my PC again. Would it be possible at this point to have the game removed from my Steam account and just get a refund? It really depresses me because I've been so looking forward to playing this game, but this is going on 3 weeks. I've tried everything I know to try.

I'm running the Prime95 "Blended" Stress test now. Where do I check the results...sorry....I've never used this program before. Also, I used the Process Explorer and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. That doesn't mean that nothing is out of the ordinary. It's just that a person with my limited tech savvy might not realize it.

Your latest output_log.txt reports the same "corrupted ZIP" error before crashing as previously. So it seems most likely that the first crash after starting with a new character caused a corruption in your savegame file. Pillars does seem to scan savegame files on startup so an invalid one can cause a crash on the intro screen. My suggestion would be to go to your savegames folder - create a subfolder in that (called "Backup" say) and to move the most recent savegame to that. Then try restarting PoE. If problems continue, move the next most recent savegame to Backup and continue until you reach one that works. That will mean losing in-game progress but if you have been saving often, hopefully not too much. If you want to confirm that a moved savegame is the cause, you can move it from Backup to the savegame folder and see if the problems return. Ok, I did what you instructed. I put the most recent save in the "Backup" folder and loaded the save prior to that....voila...it worked. so, I immediately went to an inn, rested my party, and then saved the game. As an experiment tried to load the recent save (at the inn). It crashed my PC. So, I rebooted, moved the most recent save to the "backup" folder and tried to load the previous save...it crashed my PC. <sigh> I just don't get it.

Also, I made sure that my video card was updated, the integrity of my game cache was sound, and that my anti virus program was skipping the saved game folder of PoE.

Ok, so I was unable to reload my last 3 saved games on my old character without the PC crashing. So, I started a new character and things seemed to be ok at first. I had an instance where the game crashed my PC as I was exiting the game to my desktop. Later it crashed on the intro screen before I could press "continue" or "load". It also crashed my PC for the first time when I tried to reload a game with my new main-character. I rebooted my PC and then it crashed my PC on the intro screen again....very frustrating. Here's my last saved game: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sgkbdrkkfcw7708/0f8ac0de-5f58-4145-896a-ea0e49d7b403%20autosave.savegame?dl=0 and the most recent copy of my output log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mjklioekusnvtq5/output_log.txt?dl=0 Thanks, Wes

Ok, here are the files you asked for: saved game: https://www.dropbox.com/s/z9dl2wj8607kneb/b84895ebae2b49aaab2123dadb8e315e%2010201613%20GooseandFox.savegame?dl=0 Output log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mjklioekusnvtq5/output_log.txt?dl=0 System Specs: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zz5beg6knqdzhd1/DxDiag.txt?dl=0 Thanks! Wes

....I looked for similar threads and couldn't find anything. Anyway, when I try to reload saved games (early in the game) they would *sometimes* crash. Now that I've gotten further into the game with a party of six all at 5th-level, my reloads always crash my computer. I thought maybe it was a RAM issue, so I bouth another 2 GB of RAM (I now have 10 GB). But when I tried to reload my saved game, it crashed my PC again. Any ideas as to what I can do. I'm only semi-savvy on computers, so you'll have to assume you're talking to a "PC for Dummies" type player. Thanks!