'Games' vanishing to desktop, only when online.

[Pixelsmack]

Man I am totally baffled.

I've run BURNINTEST for 30 minutes and cannot reproduce the crashes.

I can actually play my games just fine, as long as I am not connecting to the internet. Once I fire them up and connect though, BAM!

I've bypassed my router and plugged my computer directly into my DSL. I've tried different network adaptors including wifi ones.

I can play UT2004 for about 5mins then it crashes with an exemption. Sometimes it crashes as soon as I go to the server list.

I can play HL2 for about 13mins.

I can play EVE for about 2hrs but only if I stay out of the chat window or heavy traffic areas. If I don't, the game vanishes in about 4mins.

Anyone have any idea what is causing this? It only started doing this when I built my fresh system. Obviously something in this new hardware is bad, but what? Burnintest shows everything is fine. My VCORE voltage dips low every now and then so I boosted my VCORE voltage to see if that helped. It didn't, as soon as net traffic got heavy and I was playing a game, BAM.

Even if I saturate my NIC within Windows, it won't crash. I HAVE to be playing a game. I've also tried the games in a window and fullscreen, same results.

SPECS:
WinXP Pro, SP2
DX9.0c
DFI Lan Party 875p-T (latest BIOS and INTEL drivers)
P4 3.6ghz LGA775(560j), 43c idle, 63c load
3GB DDR400 (duall channel)
BFG 6800GT
Audigy 2
Ali chipset USB/Firewire addon card
9n1 card reader
Marvell 10/100 onboard nic (again I've tried four other vendor's nics)
300GB Maxtor ATA133 HD. (16mb cache, 7200rpm)

[jAkUp]

hmmm... Maybe IRQ conflict? Have you tried different mobo drivers?

[Pixelsmack]

hmmm... Maybe IRQ conflict? Have you tried different mobo drivers?

I pulled 1GB(2x512) of my dual channel ram out leaving me 2GB of dual channel(2x1GB). Things seem to be more stable now.

I've looked on line and it looks like running dual channel with more than two sticks of ram is not a good thing ESPECIALLY if you're using cheap ram. As I am. Also running mixed sizes seems to be hit or miss.

[AngelGraves13]

Make sure your BIOS says you're running the RAM by SPD (ram speed) and not your own. And disable any advanced features that say they boost performance but may cause instability.

[Son Goku]

I'm not sure with dual channel on the P4s, would have to check that one, but how many sticks of RAM do you have? AKA, if it's running dual channel, do you have an even number of sticks, and not 3? I think with the nForce chipset (OK different chipset here) this could be a problem.

Are the paired sticks in the correct DIMM sockets, and each set of DIMMs that's supposed to be paired, match? My understanding, matching chips is also a good thing, aka not getting the same capacity on the DIMM overall by having a dual bank dimm in 1 socket, and a single bank dimm (chips on one side only but of twice the capacity each) in the other... It'd also be safe to have them match by make/manufacturer, timing specs, etc...

[AngelGraves13]

I have two 512 MB chips running in Dual Channel Interleaved mode.

[Ryeyoo]

This might not do anything but if there's nothing else left, try running spybot and ad aware to see if you've collected some junk over time by accident. Also you might want to try a registry cleaner to make sure that your entries are okay and there aren't too many messy ones or broken links in it. Also, are you sure your computer is getting enough power? It could be that once you go online your network card uses just a little bit more power than what the psu has left. This sounds more likely too since your problem only happens in games where your graphics card uses more watts to ouput the visuals.