Retail Installer Hangs

I haven't heard anything like that. YOu downloaded it or you have a CD?

It worked finally after running it via the run menu from my cd/rw drive instead of my DVD drive. The drive spun up to full speed and stayed that way throughout the install. It also took several MINUTES to initiate the installer. I suspect that they have some kind of copy protection scheme or encoding going on with the retail CD. Needless to say this does not improve my impression of the game thus far...perhaps this will be the least of my problems. Anyway, that was a huge waste of my time and most gamers would not have been as patient in trying to get the installer to work anyway. I know that stardock is a small company but that is no excuse for shipping a game with problems, releasing a patch the day after the release, and not working out the kinks. Blizzard for example doesn't ship until everything is solid and that is reflected in the quality reputation of the company and their games are always worth the wait. Stardock would do well to take some pages from their playbook in the future...grumble. Thank you for responding so quickly Frogboy.

Ron, you are the ONLY Person who has ever reported such a problem. The installer is pretty bullet proof.

There is no copy protection on the CD whatsoever. I don't think it is even remotely fair to conclude that we didn't have QA. If there was a problem with the installer, this forum would be full of complaints. Incidentally, if you check the Blizzard forums, they are full of technical support issues as well. No matter how well tested a product is, you will always have some percentage of users that will run into some problem, somehow.

Anyway, glad to hear you got it working. Have fun!

~SDC~

Do you work for StarDock Frogboy? I am sorry if I was offensive, but it was a very frustrating experience. I apologize if you were offended. However, if you like I can try and get the error logs that XP generated and post them here. I have a previous engagement that I must leave for at the moment but I will see if I can determine precisely what happened and post it at a later time. Thank you.

That would be terrific.

~SDC~

Ron.
Just to let you know Frogboy is Stardock

~SDC~

What follows is my report of the incident and all of the related materials and information that I was able to recover. I have some experience in software development and testing so I will try to interpret the data where possible. I will begin with the error log entries in the application logs, there were two error events involved:

EVENT ONE

Date: 3/20/203
Time: 17:01:05
Type: Error
User: N/A
Computer: N/A
Source: Application Hang
Category: None
EventID: 1001

Fault bucket 41772278.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Data (bytes):
0000: 42 75 63 6b 65 74 3a 20 Bucket:
0008: 34 31 37 37 32 32 37 38 41772278
0010: 0d 0a ..

EVENT TWO

Date: 3/20/203
Time: 17:04:05
Type: Error
User: N/A
Computer: N/A
Source: Application Hang
Category: (101)
EventID: 1002

Hanging application menuinst.exe, version 5.0.30.0, hang module hungapp, version 0.0.0.0, hang address 0x00000000.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Data(bytes):
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 48 61 6e 67 ion Hang
0010: 20 20 6d 65 6e 75 69 6e menuin
0018: 73 74 2e 65 78 65 20 35 st.exe 5
0020: 2e 30 2e 33 30 2e 30 20 .0.30.0
0028: 69 6e 20 68 75 6e 67 61 in hunga
0030: 70 70 20 30 2e 30 2e 30 pp 0.0.0
0038: 2e 30 20 61 74 20 6f 66 .0 at of
0040: 66 73 65 74 20 30 30 30 fset 000
0048: 30 30 30 30 30 00000

Notice the NULL address in hexadecimal 0x00000000. It is possible that a null POINTER was dereferenced somewhere in the code. That would be consistent with the application hang behavior (note: this is not quite the same thing as array index out of bounds or attempting to access memory addresses which do not belong to the program such as the Operating System's reserved memory area which results in the unhandled exception error if the program doesn't employ a try catch block and handle it with a more specific error message). It is also possible that the program entered into a loop (while, for, do while) where the termination condition(s) were never met, causing the application to be unresponsive. It is interesting that this happened intermittently which suggests that the error is more subtle than a simple un-terminated loop. This concludes my analysis.