Just bought Dark Reign 1 + Expansion, but i'm still unable to play it. Whenever i try to open it up, it crashes and kills explorer.exe, then the only thing i can do is restart the PC. I have no idea what's causing the crash, since i've noticed no one talks about it in these forums. Any help? I can't play in any way.

Sys specs:

Windows 7 64-bit SP1
AMD FX-8320
Nvidia GTX 750ti
8GB RAM DDR3

Can't you start explorer.exe via Task Manager? Support ticket.

I know this is an old thread but since I had the same problem in Windows 7/64bit and found a solution that worked for me, I'll mention it here in case someone needs it too.

In my case, I needed to disable DEP in Windows (Data Execution Prevention). To disable DEP, open Command Prompt as an administrator, and type:

bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff

Then reboot your PC and run the game. I also run the game as an administrator, not sure if that matters but disabling DEP was what worked for me.

Afterwards if you want to enable DEP back, I think it is done with:

bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOn
bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx optin

And then reboot the PC.

Here's an interesting thing i found: You can disable DEP for specific programs! So rather than open yourself up to malicious software attacks, you can specify DEP to only turn off for this game. Nice!

EDIT: Dammit... stoopid forum won't let me post a link! Grr... I'll try clipping bits off of it until it'll let me post, you'll have to fill in the http etc...

thewindowsclub.com/turn-off-data-execution-prevention-dep

I don't know why, but that never worked for me. When I originally tried that a couple of years ago (using similar instructions as you linked), the window where you are supposed to select the applications for which DEP is inactive, is totally greyed out. So all I could do was to switch DEP off altogether, or on for everything.

Maybe there is some command prompt command which could fix that, dunno...


EDIT: See the attached picture, DEP.jpg. And yes I am the administrator.

Aw man, that sucks. The options are NOT greyed out on my system. I did some searching, and saw some people claiming those options are not available on 64 bit systems, but mine IS 64 bit. I saw someone mention something about possibly having to enable it in the bios if you have hardware supported DEP... and someone provided a link to some microsoft page that is no longer supported, so that's useless now.

Here's the thread: forums.anandtech.com/threads/dep-options-greyed-out.2125238/