Access violation???!

[fff]

In the past week I've had a couple of game crashes, but nothing really predictable or consistant enough to have a good whine about. Now, though, I've had two crashes in a row at the same spot - in both instances, Don and Brandi were on a date at Red's Famous 50's Diner, and they both went into the photo booth (not for woohoo, just to fulfill the 'Get Photo Taken' want). When they come out of the photo booth, the music started sounding funny (like it was stuck) and the game crashed to  desktop, with the oh-so-helpful popup telling me the game had crashed. 

I had a poke around in the error logs, and on both these occasions it says something along the lines of 'Exception code: 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION.'

What's this mean?

This is a fairly new 'restart' of Pleasantview, with just Uni and Downtown attached, I do have OFB but don't have a shopping district attached yet. No new hacks added recently, and I've tried deleting groups.cache. Actually, don't know if this is relevant, but I've noticed the size of the groups.cache file is a lot smaller than usual - normally it's about 144 KB, just now when the game crashed I noticed it was more like 14KB.  I've also loaded the lot with the testing cheats enabled thingy, but nothing comes up.

Anyway, any help/advice appreciated, laughing and pointing tolerated too if it helps get my game fixed! 

Update - okay, so I thought I'd narrowed it down to the photobooth, or that downtown lot, but it just crashed again while I was at Don's house - no photobooth at all there. More info - I have all EP's, but not FFS or the Christmas pack, am running on Windows XP, with an Intel Pentium 4 2.53 CPU, 1024 MB RAM, NVIDIA Ge Force MX 440 card, haven't updated drivers or anything lately, have run spyware/adware/crap cleaning stuff, I'm nice to my mother and I floss regularly.   

[ElfPuddle]

Flossing is good, as is being nice to mom. Is she nice to you? Do you brush as well as floss?

Wish I could be of help with the game, but everybody needs an "Attaboy!" for good manners and good hygeine.

*slaps an "Attaboy!" award on kapaucius' forehead*

[dizzy]

Try removing the custom clothes if you have any. You probably don't, so try updating your video and audio drivers. You didn't mention what type of audio you have. I suspect this is probably audio/video related.

[fff]

My audio is Avance AC97, and according to my computer, I've already got all the updated drivers. I was wondering if it was sound-related, as so far, the first sign of an impending crash has been the sound going a bit wonky. Also, in the error logs i was getting some message about being unable to cache audio, or something.... is this related to the groups.cache thing?

I do have custom clothes, will try booting them out, see if it helps. Thanks!

*wears 'Attaboy' sign with pride, not caring that I look like an idiot*

Updated - my mistake, just checked and actually says 'Error TS Audio - failed to cache resource' and there's also a whole bunch of stuff about 'Error TS Music Manager (nhood) listed twice in property category' - then there's the same entry for (buy), (build), and (CAS). Don't know if this is relevant or not.....

[twojeffs]

Those audio errors in the log files are normal and nothing to worry about. A driver issue won't show up in any of those logs. As Dizzy said, it's either badly made or corrupt custom content (clothes & skins being the most likely offenders) or an audio or video driver incompatibility.

Deleting groups.cache and letting it regenerate is also a good thing to try. That has been known to cure a good many weird problems.

[fff]

Thanks, Twojeffs - I just got rid of my most recent clothes downloads (till around the time the problems started) and - fingers crossed - so far, everything seems okay... I hope!

Consider the 'thanks' button well and truly pressed.