Blank screen after 1-2minute playing

Did you alt-tab out of SE5 for any reason?
It will freeze that game with a blank screen every time. Something to do with the mouse control. I have two screens and I can't get my mouse out of SE5 to the other screen. Forcing it with an alt-tab will freeze it.

It is however better not to as whilst it might not do it every time many games SEV including respond badly to the use of Alt tab and similar and its better not to use them. There is a minimise button in the top RHS of the game which does work well and does not crash the game at all. The game may experience some lag for a while after maximising the game, but this passes and the game works normally. SEV and many other games responds badly to pop up alerts, and such things as power savers and screen savers especially if they happen whilst the game is carrying out a process as it always is at the beginning of a player turn. Then certain Mods seem to crash more often for me the balance Mod is the least stable but I can’t guess why as all use the same core game.

Did you try disabling the music? I have a system very similar to yours, just slightly faster AMD, GeForce 6800GT, 2GB memory etc and couldn’t even start the game with the music enabled. I use a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 for sound and have the latest drivers on everything. To disable the music:

- a. Open the file SE5\Data\Settings.txt.
- b. Set the field "Allow Music" to FALSE.
- c. Save the file and run the game again.
- d. If this fixes the problem, then you should try downloading the latest drivers for your sound card. After installing them, try setting the field back to TRUE.

Obviously the last part turning the sound back on didn’t work for me.

And just for the record, I use ALT-Tab hundereds of times every day while playing this game. I feequently overlay it with a notepad window in which I make notes about the current game. Also, when I have a lot of ship movemenets or long processing times, I'll also overlay it with Freecell, Minesweeper and the like and then switch back and forth between them with ALT-Tab. It's never, ever once caused the slightest problem.

In truth, the single major cause people have for a lot of these non-bug problems is simply drivers and hardware incompatiblities with the game itself. It's not OS-related issues at all. Even the memory leak thing isn't a Windows issue - that problem is from the game engine itself in that it *fails* to notify Windows properly when it releases a segment of memory.

So just stick with what you know and stop peppering this forum with your silly, worthless advice, please.

It is as my fencing master says "an endless trouble to to cast a stone at every dog that barks at you but" the Micky soft fan boy is tempting me.

Throw all the stones you like, Simon. But I'm no MS fan. I'm just VERY tired of seeing a few of you would-be experts (and you're certainly one of THE worst!) who know practically nothing but is wasting everone's time and effort with sheer nonsense. Just like your most recent "intelligent" suggestion I saw: "Clear you cache" where you are clearly talking about swap-space instead and there's NO way to clear that without closing the game. Really smart suggestion - NOT!

my $0.02,

I used ALT-TAB all the time with XP SP2 and NEVER had a problem. I continue to use it with Vista Home Premium and so far, have not had any problems.

What an odd thing to suspect ALT-TAB of that problem.

You should see the programming effort it takes to have a direct-x application ALT-TAB properly.
It's always messy due to the way direct-x is designed.

However it is true that I also have no problems alt-tabbing multiple times in a row, although each time I do it I fear that I will be left with a gray screen!