More Awesome Than You!

Alright, I just installed Bon Voyage.  Unfortunately, it randomly freezes after a few minutes of play.  The sound continues playing, but everything is locked up.  The curser will still move for a few minutes, then it will freeze.  There seems to be no pattern.  This will happen during play, buy, and build modes.  I cannot minimize the program or bring up the task manager.  The computer will not shut down after pressing the power button or restart with ctrl+alt+delete.  I have to cut the power manually by holding the power button in.  I reduced the sound acceleration in DirectX, as EA recommends, and then turned it off entirely.  I set the affinity to CPU1.  I have turned off all back ground processes.  Of course I tried it with no CC.  Nothing solves it.

My system more than  meets the requirements, but to be sure:
XP Media SP2
PentiumD 3.2 GHz
1 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 256MB

So far I have only found references to this problem on macs.  Has anyone heard of this problem on P.C.'s, and a way to fix it?

Does this happen with Free Will deactivated?

Do you have the most recent NVidia drivers?

I have had the same exact problem ever since BV came out. We have similar specs although you have a faster processor then I do and my card is the Nvidia 7600 GT.

I played the update, roll back, try different drivers, game for a few months before I finally just gave up. I haven't found any solution or pattern to the computer freeze up. I finally just uninstalled BV and hope that EA figures out a patch to solve the Nvidia conflict.

I didn't mess with free will since it will happen in buy and build modes too, when the sims aren't doing anything anyway. 

Yes, I updated the driver too, which installed this bloated Nvidia setting control thing. 

So you think this has something to do with the video card?  I am getting so sick of EA.  I almost didn't bother with Bon Voyage, after the SafeDisk fiasco, but since I have no problems with NWN2, I figured I'd risk this SecuRom.  After all this there's no way I'm messing with a Sims 3.  I was really looking forward to Spore, but now I don't know if I will ever buy another EA title again.

Have you tried using the bloated Nvidia Setting control thing to turn things down a bit?

So don't? Yarr!

I'm suffering from this problem whenever I "Set Priority - High" for sims2ep6 in Task Manager. However, when I "Set Priority - Normal" for sims2ep6, BV runs ok. Weird.

I turned off shading, even thought there has been no blue-screen or crashing, and this time I was able to play for over an hour without it freezing, though the fish tank was boring.  Of course, it has been totally random, happening once after only five minutes and another time after twenty.  I could have just gotten lucky.

One neat thing is that, other than the freezing, the game does seem to be responding faster.  Before it has taken several seconds to enter buy or build mode, and at least half a minute to load collections, but now they come right up without a delay.