Game Doesn't Start (MORAL: Delete groups.cache Before Posting)

[akatonbo]

I'm stumped -- got home today, downloaded a few things (one mod, dolphin26's Servos Recharge at Night, the rest just ordinary custom content), went to start up the game... it showed the splash screen, then nothing. The CD drive went quiet and the executable didn't show up in the list of processes running. Rebooted, made sure the CD drive was behaving (stuck a DVD full of AVIs in it and tested a few), tried setting up a shortcut to run the game in windowed mode... nothing. I was playing last night. Nothing was behaving oddly, nothing's changed except for that handful of downloads, which I know couldn't stop the game in its tracks THAT soon. I'm not even getting the EA and Maxis logos, so there isn't much I can do to troubleshoot, which I would normally do quite a bit of before bringing something here; I'm only hoping that someone already knows what might cause such a problem.

(For the record, I've got all actual EPs but no HP or FF, and I'm running WinXP Home with SP2 on a slightly over a year old Dell Dimension 8400, 3GHz processor, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon X300. Have been successfully playing with no significant problems for several months, albeit not terribly much since the OFB install.)

[yetyak]

Did you delete the groups.cache file?  Often times that will do the trick.

[cwieberdink]

Hmmm.. I was having this exact thing happen the other day during my game problems.  I fixed it by finishing my reinstall.  That's weird that you're having this without having uninstalled anything.  What happens if you take out the new cc?


C

[akatonbo]

Durrrr, I R smrt. Thanks, yetyak -- I know about groups.cache but I hadn't thought to try it, probably because I don't have to do it often and forgot. -.-

[yetyak]

I've been having to do it alot lately, so it came right to mind!   

[dadditude]

Quick question: What information does groups.cache contain, and what do you lose by deleting it?

[BlueSoup]

I don't know if anyone really knows.  It's thought that it contains game data and sometimes when it gets too big, it'll cause some weird effects in either loading or closeing your game.

You don't lose anything by deleting it, it'll regen the instant you restart your game.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Forestalls a lot of problems if you do it each time too.  It must contain Custom Conten data, as it's got bigger each time I've put more CC into my game.

[J. M. Pescado]

Hmmm. I've been seeing the "Old Car Start", myself, although usually this is resolved thus far by banging on it some more, figuring if I click about 20 times on the startup icon, it eventually loads. Maybe it's time I stomped groups.cache.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Maybe it is!

[MxxPwr]

Also something I've experienced:

Apparently TS2 generates an autorun.exe and a second autorun file (but I can't remember the extenstion) in the temp folder of the current user for XP. My AO-Hell spyware protection saw it as a trojan and squished it. My game wouldn't run when I put the disk in. So, I deleted the contents of the temp folder and put the disk in again. It regened the autorun.exe and everything was fine (apparently the spyware protection doesn't see it as the same file it squished earlier).

So, be on the lookout for your spyware/virus protection putting a stop action on an EA autorun.exe file in the temp foler.

Just food for thought.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Worrying......