During the opening cinematic after I start single player, the game almost immediately freezes up, and eventually crashes to the desktop, even if i choose to skip the cutscene.

Specs

i7 quad 2.6
vista 64
gtx 285
6 gigs of ram

I wasted nearly three hours of my time last night trying to get this to work. I updated my drivers and reinstalled the game. My sound card is up to date as well, though the game still crashes, please help someone.

hmm had the same problem ( and solved it with new soundcard drivers).. have a look at your problem events from vista and see why it crashes ..

which soundcard do you have ?

Thanks for trying to help wasp.

My soundcard says "Realtek High Definition Audio"

How do I check my problem events?

hey, im having the same problem (since friday). never updated sound drivers but updated everything else.

Jesus, try updating your sound card drivers, it seems to have worked for others, just not me lol

hmm im pretty sure i never put any audio drivers on this.

Follow these steps Jesus

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/166774

umm i just installed sound card driver and it didnt work

does anybody have any more ideas cuz i need them!

Is there technical support help in this forum? I'd really like some help that doesn't involve Jesus praying for me.

i dont understand step #2 i didnt see a hardware tab but there was a device manager

Go to your sound properties and reduce the sampling quality to DVD.

I had the same problem until I upgraded the sound card drivers via windows update. I've a Soundblaster xtreme gamer card, newer WDM drivers were listed as an optional update and now the game doesn't crash on the first mission cutscene!

This problem affects the whole game on certain hardware, not just the opening cut scene.

DVD sampling is the only way around it, so I'm hoping for new audio drivers for my on-board audio or a patch for the game.

I think the main problem with this crash is memory. If you are running more than 4gig you get a crash just before the opening cut scene. I installed the game on my PC that has 8 gig of memory and it just crashes all the time. uninstalled the game and put it on my other pc with 4gig, and no problem runs perfectly. I just hope a patch sorts this out soon.