Partypoker skins application errors

[dutchgrl]

In the last few months I am playing my games, and all of a sudden I get the error message "Empire poker application has encountered an error". The screens will start dissapearing partly, I cannot read my cards/the board sometimes. It causes me to have to uninstall and reinstall the program to get it to work again. I e-mailed the site, they told me to defragment and clean up my disk, I did that, and still it does it from time to time. Has anyone else encountered this problem before/knows a possible solution? Thanks!!

[StellarWind]

My old Windows ME machine used to have problems somewhat like this. The problems went away when I got a new PC with lots of memory and Windows XP Pro. It seemed to be a memory leak of some sort. Here are some things that I did to minimize the problem:

1. Reboot the machine before beginning to play. Playing a couple of nights in a row without rebooting would usually cause problems.

2. Avoid running other programs that use a lot of memory, especially PokerTracker.

3. At the first sign of graphics problems I would turn off autopost and end the session as quickly as possible. Then I would reboot. Once trouble started it only got worse.

Good luck.

[Orpheus]

Last weekend, my usual Win2K partition went wacko, and I wanted to finish clearing my bonus before dealing with it, so I booted to a pristine Win98 partition (which I keep in case I need to access my years of data and work CD backups in QIC format, which only Win9x can read.) I had exactly the problem you described. There were probably two reasons it did this on my system.

First: simultaneous use of certain data files (especially databases using file locking); it had little problem reading hand history files that were simultaneously being read by Auto-Import, but invariably threw an PartyPoker app error when I replayed a hand in GameView from a PT database being updated via auto-import [which was a bummer, because I usually replay key hands when I'm on a waiting list]

The other major problem seemed to involve the OS screen redraw functions, and related functionality like fonts.

These issues never arose in Win2K, so I think it's an issue in the 9x vs NT cores and base functionality. You can fix some of this by updating your MDAC and JET to the *latest* version [WinUpdate stops a couple of sub-versions below the latest update patch available from the Microsoft support site -- e.g. MDAC 2.6 vs. 2.8, IIRC]

[OOT, if anyone knows a 3rd party utility that can restore files from QIC backups, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Also, can WinME recover backed up files from the older Win9x QIC format? I learned the hard way that the version of backup in Win98SE couldn't recover early Win95 data backups]