Stumped - Here we go again with hanging .exe's

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Specs:

K8N Neo4 F
AMD A64 3500+
6600GT vid
gig’o ram
audigy 1

Ok, so when I built this box and put XP Pro on it, patched up everything, and all my stuff ran fine. Still runs fine. I have a ton of games on it, no issues but this…

Installed steam, dl HL2, fire it up and HL2.exe shows in the task list, but no visible indication it’s doing anything. So it loads up and instantly hangs. I gave up on it after about 3 days of trying - because hey, everything else works.

Last night, I decided to try Fate from wildtangent. Same deal. Fate.exe loads into the process list, and nothing further happens. So I downloaded Mojo Master because it was another game of theirs, and behold! It too loads and hangs.

I ran msconfig, disabled all my startup processes and services, and had no change. I’ve had zero instability from the machine, so no clue what’s going on. Is there some way I can follow what these executables are doing when they hang so I can trace the issue they’re having?

2

Is your firewall configured to allow these programs access to the internet?

3

Try this:

Right click on the .exe, choose Properties, and under the Compatibility tab, choose “Run this program in compatibility mode” and choose Win98. Helped me with a couple of games that woulnt’t launch properly.

4

Yep.

Actually I just fixed the wildtangent games. I’m trying HL2 again as soon as it downloads.

I fired up HijackThis and of course I DO NOT have any spyware crap on my system… but I yanked out the iconpackager dll from stardock, the nvidia app entries, and basically everything non essential to the bootup of the system. Cured. I’m tempted to put it all back to hunt down what it was one item at a time - but I’m not that crazy right now.