Heya gang! Well I finnaly got a new machine thanks to a dear brother of mine, only I am having some issues with mercs. I have installed windows XP home, and the video card and sound card from my old machine which seem to work fine. I have installed mw4 veng and 2 installs of mercs, patched one install of mercs to the current league standard and left the other at pr1. as well as MW3, which has been patched to take care of the XP issue it had. The issue is that they hang up the whole system when i try to start them. the CPU usage goes to 100% and it takes forever for the task manager to come up. It's weird. I can run MS combat Flight simulator fine and crimson skies runs better than ever, but no mech games are working. any ideas as to what might be causing that?

hmmm...seem to remember something about that task manager hang. This link doesn't give a lot of detail, but it might lead you to something useful.

Microsoft Vagueness

And this one one of my personal favorites:
A Classic

And a quick search here turns up lots of interesting discussions about Merc Issues, but I haven't found one that directly applies:
Searching the Banzai

There are a lot of variables in what you posted, and Mercs is a twitchy beast at this point because of the original twitchy code and years with a hundred amateur developers groping around under the hood. Do you have any more detail? Does this happen in conjunction with other programs running? Is there an AV running? etc.

sorry it has taken so long to get back to this thread. Long story about a video card cpu fan, some screws and a squad of bothan spies, another time....

not sure what an AV is? to the best of my knowledge it doesn't happen in conjunction with any other programs. MW3 fired up once and then didn't. I have checked all the settings against the Microsof Vagueness site and everything looks to be in order, so I dunno what to say. Lemme try it again and see if I can snag some more details.

EDIT: Okay, I have discovered that mw3 works now. so that problem solved itself.

MW4 however is a different story. i remember that the first time I tried to start the game the first time I got some message that asked me if I wanted to continue blocking this program. I clicked now. It asked me the same thing when I tried to start the pr1 version.
I turned off the fire wall and that didn't help, so I dunno. it comes up and asks me if I want to play, I click play, it starts, the main screen comes up with the fatboy blasting the owens, then a windows box opens up and everything freezes.
any ideas?

Hey, does that windowed box happen to be the another sort of configuration screen? or is it a Box telling you that this program needs to close due to some error? If it's the config screen, just let it do its thing and fully come up. For some reason this seems to take a while even on my system. Once it comes up, just do the config how you see fit, and it should work fine after that. Hope that helps.

Well, "AV" is a common (though not universal, it seems ) abbreviation for "Anti-Virus". Some of these Terminate but Stay Resident programs can cause conflicts for such demanding applications as GAMES.

And this whole situation you're in sounds VERY familiar - I used to have to 'play roulette' to see if Mercs would fire up; nine times out of ten, I'd get a generic-sounding 'cannot load' dialog box and would have to click OK, and then try again. I'm struggling to remember what Operating System, Vidi card & drivers and the like I had - I've had Mercs installed with the current hard-drive & hardware, and I haven't had any problem...

...I think it was before I got the second PC and was playing on the compy that Dancer now uses? Yeah - heck, I've since discovered problems with the original CD-Rom drive on that compy, and installed a CD burner/reader to supplant the original drive. What went wrong with Mercs is it couldn't read the CD's copy protection properly due to the progressing drive issue, and the program would crash on startup. And strangely, MW4 Mercs was the ONLY game that would glitch out - for maybe about a year before it started getting wiggy in general. How long have you had your CD drive?

just got the CD drive, here's the stats thanks to PC wizard (thanks Fukushu

General Information :
IDE Controller : Nvidia Corp nForce2 ATA Controller
IDE Controller : Integrated Technology Express (ITE) Inc IT8212 ATA RAID Controller
IDE Controller : Silicon Image Inc (Was: CMD Technology Inc) SiI 3112 SATARaid Controller

Informations CD-Rom SAMSUNG CDRW/DVD SM-352N :
IDE Controller : nForce2 ATA Controller
IDE Channel : #1 - Master Drive
Manufacturer : SAMSUNG
Model : SAMSUNG CDRW/DVD SM-352N
Revision : TA01
Interface : ATA
IORDY : Yes
LBA Mode : Yes
DMA Mode : Yes
Multiword DMA Mode : 2
PIO Mode : PIO 4
UDMA Mode max. : 2 (ATA-33)
UDMA Mode Enabled : 2 (ATA-33)
Rotation Control : CLV

CD-R Read : Yes
CD-RW Read : Yes
DVD-Rom Read : Yes
DVD-RAM Read : Yes
DVD-R Read : Yes
DVD-RW Read : Yes
DVD+R Read : No
DVD+RW Read : No
DVD+R DL Read : No
DVD BD Read : No

CD-R Write : Yes
CD-RW Write : Yes
DVD-RAM Write : No
DVD-R Write : No
DVD+R Write : No
DVD-RW Write : No
DVD+RW Write : No
DVD+R DL Write : No
DVD BD Write : No

Method 2 : Yes
CD-Audio Support : Yes
MultiSession or Photo-CD : Yes
Side Change Capable : No

Reading CD-Rom : 52x (9154 KB/s)
Reading DVD-Rom : 16x

Writing CD-R : 52x (9256 KB/s)
Writing CD-RW : 32x

does that hlp?