This is a strange one, and I don't think anyone else on this particular forum has posted about it, so here's how to fix a very specific and persistent crash to desktop issue with Clear Sky. The problem occurs unrelentingly with fresh, unmodded installs of the game, as well as installs which are modded with Clear Sky Complete (which itself contains the Sky Reclamation Project patch).

My Specs:

OS: Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 x64
RAM: 4GB Corsair DDR2 PC2-6400 CM2X2048-6400C5
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz
GPU: ATI AMD Radeon HD 5850 1GB
Soundcard: SoundMAX Integrated Digital HD Audio
Motherboard: ASUS Striker Extreme (nForce Chipset)

The Problem:

After playing the game for a very brief period, ranging anywhere from the middle of the first "in-game" cutscene to soon after the first mission, the game will either vanish without errors to the desktop, or the screen will go black and the audio will cut out, but the game will still linger and hog control of your system until you terminate the xrEngine.exe task manually.

When you check the crash log in your user profile (C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Stalker-STCS\logs) the final entry will say:

Not enough storage is available to process this command.

This error is usually encountered when the system RAM is maxed out (often when there is actually plenty of RAM to spare), and is an error for which there are numerous workarounds. In the case of Clear Sky, however, it seems that no amount of RAM or registry tweaking will be enough to get rid of this error.

The Fix:

I have isolated the problem down to one graphical setting: DirectX 10.

In the Video options, change the lighting to Full Dynamic Lighting (or lower, if you like) rather than Full Dynamic Lighting (DX10). Click the Advanced button on the bottom of the Video options, then scroll down and make sure the Use DX10.1 option is unticked. You might need to restart the game first, and it will probably be automatically unticked when you disable the first DX10 option.

If these two DirectX 10 options are disabled, the problem will be gone entirely. The game will even launch faster, and the levels will load faster.

Disabling such an option is anathema to people like me who have a rig which is more than capable of utilising it, but when it comes to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, all bets are off!

In my research for a solution to this issue I encountered one particular fix numerous times (like here) which involves adding/editing registry entries, but don't bother using it to try to solve any issues you have with Clear Sky. It doesn't work, because a lack of RAM isn't actually the problem here. If RAM is even involved, it's because of a memory leak or some similar perversion of game code, not because your hardware is lacking or faulty.

I was getting this problem as well. At first I thought is was the SMAA injector I was using from ZRP, but removing that only reduced the frequency of the crashes, it didn't eliminate them. So far, after switching to Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting (DX9), I haven't gotten one of those black screens yet.

Too bad, I kinda liked the DX10 look.

Be aware that the in-game anti-aliasing doesn't work with the DX9 renderers in this game. You need something like SMAA injector or SweetFX to do that for you. Those are nice options though, since the AA they provide seems to have no noticeable performance impact.

Thanks for posting this solution. Sadly it did not work for me. It's definitely the same problem as the log file also says "Not enough storage is available to process this command." (although on my system it actually says that in German) but the game still crashes as soon as I load one of my more recent saved games. I guess I'll have to go even lower or try other settings.

Man, this sucks. The game has been working perfectly fine except for the occasional graphical glitch on the Garbage during bad weather. Then I reached the point where you get knocked out by bandits in your search for Fang and soon after I started encountering this crash.

I presume you've tried running it in dx9 mode intead?! - I think Lost Alpha was the first stalker game to properly utilise the dx10 stuff.

Not yet as I had grown tired after experimenting with the DX10/10.1 options. :P

I'd try that then - if I remember correctly the games suffered dx10 problems until the newer version of the xray engine (and I dont mean the one in CoP).

I have this exact problem and nothing works for me. What should i do?