Error! Yet another unidentifiable nerve-wrecker

[CrackedMirror]

Error! Yet another unidentifiable crash ...

So all in all, I haven't had many problems with Vampire Bloodlines,
and thought I was getting off pretty good left mostly undisturbed by any occurring horrid technical issues compared to those manifold problems that I kept hearing of related to Bloodlines. Except a few minor things like the usual bucking in otherwisely fluid motions, etc, I haven't experienced unsolvable issues.

... Until now.

I have not continued playing the game for a while and had it lying around idly on my hard drive, so to speak (whilst I was too busy with real life things to find enough time or room to even contemplate playing computer games).

As I said, until that break of playing it, everything worked fine.
(Maybe I should add here that my system, which operates on XP, meets all requirements, too.)

~I'm at the very end of chinatown,
packed with new information about the whereabouts of the Sarcophagus,
and simply want to leave the area.

Heading to the street, I run around the corner, see the cab driver, go to the cab driver, see the "talk" symbol, press E, and KEEP GETTING THIS:

http://spectacle-macabre.lenzus.com/con ... 635443.jpg

after an instant crash that has me ending up abruptly on my desktop.

The technical report doesn't enlighten me one bit,
and I start to become frustrated to a degree where I soon can no longer guarantee for the log and undent survival of my computer mouse.
I'm not sure if that was irony.

And the emote next to my post headline doesn't depict my distress sufficiently enough at all.

(I tried to randomly interact with the game meanwhile to see if anything apart from the cab driver
causes the game to crash. It turns out that the crash occurs as soon as I attempt to talk to any NPC.)

Help?

[Wesp5]

http://spectacle-macabre.lenzus.com/con ... 635443.jpg

after an instant crash that has me ending up abruptly on my desktop.

Judging from the error message I would guess that you listened to Bloodlines sound files which the Windows Media Player which makes them crash the game.

[Decalies]

Looking up 'mssmp3.asi' (just in google) does give some possible problems. The first hits are all about Call of Duty where someone has a problem with the same file. Apparently that might have to do with the version of the Miles audio files.
I don't know if that points to you a possible solution. In one of those hits, some work-arounds are described, but obviously I don't know whether it also holds for Vampire.

[CrackedMirror]

Judging from the error message I would guess that you listened to Bloodlines sound files which the Windows Media Player which makes them crash the game.

Hmm, I don't even use the Windows Media Player, and haven't done anything
with the sound files as far as I recall.

Also, Decalies, thanks for the reference.

I ended up re-installing the game in the end.
It works just as fine as it used to before now,
though I would have liked to find out the source of the problem.

I do now have a grey "Loading..."-screen
(which I'm guessing has something to do with my graphics board as I'm using a widescreen patch) that I hadn't had before, but other than that everything is as it should. Thank god, I would have slowly gone ballistic without my favourite game running. (Without me even having finished it, on top of that.)

Thanks for the response though.

[sunsmountain]

You don't actually have to listen

You don't actually have to listen..
Windows Media Player library composing does that automatically for you, if you allow it to index your entire music collection and let it search freely. I never check those options and always uncheck everything I can, but that may explain the source when you upgraded to WMP 10 or 11 which may have happened when you used Windows Update and clicked quick or recommended (i always pick adjusted / detailed).