Game Installation help with - Error during initialization: unhandled exception caught

Submitted by TheMookster on Sat, 01/03/2009 - 02:17
 The frustrations of installing a new game................
 
After eagerly unwrapping my Christmas presents this year(2008), I was lucky enough to recieve from Mrs Mookster, a much anticipated shiney new copy of CALL of DUTY WORLD at WAR, flipping it over I read the SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:  Vista or XP - Ive got XP,  Pentium4 3.0GHZ - yeah, thats what I've got, so I'm just scraping in there........, memory: 512MB Ram, well I got 2GB, so plenty to spare there, and Graphics requires an NVIDIA 6600GT or better, so I should be fine with a NVIDIA 7600GT!!
Right, all is well and good then, although I've known for a long time that I need to replace my ageing IDE hard drive, with a more modern SATA version, (IDE transfers data at 100MB's a sec, SATA1/SATA2 at 150MB's/300MB's a sec) to improve my PC's gameplay ability. So that is what I did, I purchased a Western Digital 160GB internal HDD (SATA2) for just £40!!  and spent a day of fun turning it into my primary hard drive, for games only, whilst using my old 120GB HDD for documents, photo's, storage, etc.
 
That was the easy bit! Next came COD5 installation!!.............................................
 
Initally it was straightforward, put the disc in, enter the serial key, and off it went installing in record time thanks to the new Hard Drive. Do you want to install DirectX 9.0c?? ok then, just to be sure I'm up to date, do you want shortcuts putting on your desktop?? yeah again, and that was it, I was rubbing my hands eagerly in anticipation, I clicked the icon for single player on my desktop and waited for it to fire up.............................
NOTHING!!!.......................
so I tried again...................................
AGAIN NOTHING..........................................................................
so I clicked on the Multiplayer icon...........................................
after a few seconds my desktop reverted to 800x600 resolution as if the game was starting, and then a black screen, swiftly followed by
A SYSTEM CRASH with the error message: Error during initialization: unhandled exception caught, do you want to send an error report?
NO I just want my game to work.................
MMMMmmmm I thought to myself, what could be wrong, so I tried again, same thing: Error during initialization: unhandled exception caught.
So off I went trawling the internet, trying to find a fix, Activision being my first port of call, most of the fixes there are general ones and not related to my specific error , but hopefully they work for the majority of people, but not for me. so I had to go searching some more, and I came up with numerous solutions,
most of them can be found at: http://www.codhq.com/modules.phpname=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=4746&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 ..........so far there are 11 pages of suggestions (30/12/2008) 
I tried all of them, and to cut a long story short, after about 5 hours of pulling my hair out I came across a post by a guy named Yozz76 which I have cut and pasted here for the benefit of anyone out there getting the same error, allthough please beware that altering your registry could seriously damage your PC, so always make a note of anything that you alter, just in case................anyway here is the post: 
Thought I'd join the forum and hopefully put many of you out of your misery and officially declare myself as a genius! I bought this game on launch day and have not been able to play it until last night. My problem was that it would crash to desktop when I launched game. I tried all the fixes on the net such as setting sound to 48khz and disabling unimodem half duplex in device manager etc. Anyways, none of these supposed fixes worked for me and many others. I have tried so many things to get this game working which you would not believe.
Last night I had a flash of inspiration. I checked dxdiag which showed my sound card as emulated! That can't be right I thougt, so I went about researching the net and found the following;

The solution lay in a very old WinXp problem. Winxp and 2k incorrectly set the drivers to EMULATED. The trouble is, it's what directsound uses to remember whether it's hardware or software, and my dxdiag thought I had no hardware buffer.

Try start-run-dxdiag[enter] and look at the "sound" or "sound1" tab. If it says the device is EMULATED then this may work for you, it worked for me.

The only way to fix it is to do a regedit (Start-run "regedit"[enter]
and search (Ctrl+F) for every instance of the entry "Device Presence".
Once there, in each one there should have some or all of the following:

(Default)
Emulated
VxD
WDM

Anyways, in most of these in my registry, VxD and WDM were set to 0, and emulated was set to 1. I modified the values so Emulated read 0 and VxD and WDM read as 1. Do this for every entry, by right clicking on the value and editing. Naturally it may be wise to keep a note of original settings on each (some will be 1,0,0 others will be 1,1,1 - was for me anyway) just incase something borks and you need to reset them.

You will have to re-run DXDIAG (start-run "dxdiag"[enter]) and set the hardware accelleration back to full and test it.  

 
Well, I clicked START, RUN, and typed in dxdiag and pressed ENTER, but no mention of the word emulated, so I did a regedit and searched for 'DEVICE PRESENCE',     Where I found that Emulated VxD & WDM were all set to 1, so I altered the values so that Emulated read 0 and VxD and WDM read as 1, as Yozz76 suggested, went back to dxdiag reset the hardware acceleration and tested - all OK. 
So I closed these windows and with trembling hands, left clicked my mouse on the CODWAW desktop icon and hey presto, after much whirring and clicking it sprang into life, so I NOW HAVE A PLAYABLE GAME, even if its on a resolution of 1024x768 in multiplayer (lags on anything greater), but at least the singleplayer works in 1280x1024, and what a game it is, initially I had reservations,
(see Comments @ http://www.brbr.info/node/142) but so far the singleplayer has blown me away, and Im getting into the online version too, but ACTIVISION, why oh why are so many people having problems? just read the forums to see what I mean, alot of people would have given up and got a refund a long time before my stubborn ass did.
 
Anyway its been worth the wait, so HAPPY GAMING and A HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all.
I hope this helps
 
 TheMookster 30/12/2008

 

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