Installed the DD, started it, waiting for a long time... As you can see, I started the game from 06.35... It's now 06:53 and the game won't run... Renaming the executable works, but that slaughters the savegame... Anybody got solution?

Did you try shutting down all non-essential programs before trying to start the game?

Did you try running the configuration program and setting the resolution first (or try different resolutions)? You could also try switching to Software mode rather than Direct3D.

If you right click on the executable, or shortcut, and select properties, you can try running it as administrator, or in different compatibility modes.


There may be some suggestions that you have not tried yet in the topics below.

Crash at Launch Vista 64

Divine Divinity not playing correctly

If the name of the file causes a problem, then it may be due to a conflict with your anti-virus program or firewall. Did you try shutting them down first? Someone else mentioned a problem with the game because their firewall popped up a dialog box behind the game, and they only noticed it when they Alt-tabbed out of the game (if they exited the game the dialog box closed before they saw it).

Try moving the Divine Divinity folder to a different location. If a different name for the executable helps, a different path may, as well.

I disabled the firewall and anti-virus everytime I wanted to play. And no, installing to different location didn't help at all. I suspect this might have something to do with gameux.dll, because that is what the rundll32.exe (which piggybacked the game) called...

You can check the screenshot...

Does this have something to do with the System Locale that you have set? Was the game installed with the same Locale that you have now (which isn't English).

From the .png it appears you have many programs running at once--which ordinarily shouldn't cause a problem--which leads me to believe you are suffering from two or more programs trying to write to the same location in ram. Reboot then shut down any of those programs and try again. What OS?

A second look at your file--geesh, man, you are using ~25% of your cpu and it looks like ~60% of your ram--looks like there's a lot of stuff you need to shut down.

Yes, it's installed with the same locale that I have now, which is Japanese. Why? Because there are a few games from my library that requires it... I'm using Win 7 64-bit. I'm using a lot of it because there's anti-virus, firewall, anti-spyware, and most of the essential services...

Not while you are not playing them, it doesn't. Revert to English while you are not playing the Japanese games.

Very well, I'll try this first...

I tried everything from English(Australia) to English(Zimbabwe) locale... no dice... guess I'll double execute the exe file for now...

I am having the same problem. The first time I start the game it launches rundll32.exe which uses about 70% of the cpu but nothing happens. The second time the game launches fine, but stutters when moving sideways, because rundll32 uses the CPU.
When I switch out of the game and stop the rundll32 process the game seems to work fine. But if I end the rundll32 before launching the game, it will not work.
So what is going on? What is this rundll32 launched for? Why does it use so much CPU? (2500K)

Rundll32.exe is part of Windows and used to launch dlls that are not otherwise linked to a specific executable program. See this page (for example) for how to determine what dll is being launched:

Devspar mentioned gameux.dll (Windows 7 Game Explorer), which can cause this problem if it doesn't have internet access (constantly trying to use network functions).

Windows 7 Issue with Old Games

Try starting the Games Explorer (click Start and type Games into the search box, then click on Games Explorer), and in the options set it to never check online for updates, and not to download art or game information.

Wow..spot on! ;)

Now that I knew what to look for I could also notice this behaviour with other games where it did not interfere with the games performance. So all this because I have windows firewall set to block everything by default so game explorer could not connect.
That second link is a very interesting read. So it seems the only two options are allowing stuff with the firewall or deleting this gameux.dll. What do you recommend? Deleting or renaming that dll seems to be the easier solution. Strange that there seems to be no way to entirely deactivate this game explorer. All the updating and downloading options within it are already off.

Edit: For now I renamed the gameux.dll in the syswow64 folder to .dll1, seems to work, hope there are no unintended effects,but at least it is easily reversable

Yes, if you don't want to make an exception for the Games Explorer in your firewall, then deleting (or renaming, just in case you run into any problems with new games that assume it will be available) the dll files seems like the easiest solution. The third link was someone deleting some registry entries in order to fix the same problem.

I hadn't even run the Games Explorer (computer is a couple years old) until I made that last post, to check if there were options to disable it.