Half Life 2 Crashing After Loading Screen

SillyHeatsink · 13 Jul 2008 at 18:57

This is the first time I've posted asking for help with a game crashing. Normally I trawl google till I find a fix, but this is baffling me...

I bought the Orange Box the weekend. Installed Steam, downloaded, updated, all that jazz. Had an error with the Miles audio codec, copying mss32.dll from system32 to game directory solved that

Half Life 2 crashes after I click 'New Game' and the black loading screen with Half Life 2 written on it disappears. Error message is 'hl2.exe has experienced an error yadda yadda yadda' - generic app crash error message.

The thing is, Lost Coast, Episodes 1 and 2, TF2...all play fine! No errors. My pc as in sig, ATI HD2900Pro. I have re downloaded the game, reinstalled, updated Catalyst to 8.6 from 8.1. My overclock is stable, 4 hour Prime and 1 hour Memtest86.

This is driving me up the walls. Any help is greatly appreciated!

SillyHeatsink · 13 Jul 2008 at 19:24

$loth said:
delete clientregistry.blob in program files\steam and restart.

Cheers, I'll try this now!

I'm running XP, though I intend to upgrade to 64bit Vista (or just wait for Win7...)

I'll let you know how I go, thanks for the help, very much appreciated.

*edit: I'm running 32bit XP!

SillyHeatsink · 13 Jul 2008 at 19:31

Damn and blast, deleting clientregistry.blob didn't work.

Any other thoughts before I return this PoS to the store for a refund? This is infuriating (and just a little embarrassing!), HL2 works on my housemate's Dell which is basically a toaster with a monitor attached.

SillyHeatsink · 13 Jul 2008 at 20:01

I'll try the Cinematic mod.

Lost Coast is now crashing whenever I enter a room in the village. Same room, every time, same error message as with HL2. I'm really stumped. I can run Gears of War, Bioshock, Half Life 1, everything except this! Argh.