PlayOnline Viewer and FFXI freezing/crash

[JamSessionEin]

I need some help with this.

To give you the situation:

I'm using a Sony Vaio PC; 2Ghz, 512Mb of Ram, 80 gigs of memory. If this is important, and it might be, I use a triple-monitor display, which means that I have three monitors hooked up to the computer to make a long horizontal desktop. I've played FFXI before on this machine no problem; the game starts up and runs in the middle screen, while the other two screens just display my desktop, and everything works fine.

Recently, I started up my Playonline viewer, and sat through the intro movie, which I haven't disabled because I happen to like it. When I got to the 'click to continue' part, I clicked, and my computer crashed, and the monitor on which I had playonline open turned into jagged pixels, no longer displaying anything really intelligible.

So I restarted. And tried again. With the same results.

I restarted once more, tried again, only this time using the playonline viewer in fullscreen mode so it filled the middle monitor entirely. I made it all the way into FFXI, had the game up and running, and logged in. And my screen was black. Pitch black. For 15 minutes, until I hit the windows key to get out of the game, because I had no menus or mouse. I could still hear my character walking, however, and the familiar ring of my mouse on the menus.

And when I got back to the playonline viewer again, it froze.
Again.

So, I thought to myself that since I'd been meaning to reformat my computer, I'd go ahead and do it; I wiped out the whole PC and returned it to factory settings, and re-established my three monitor display.

I reinstall Playonline, go to run the thing and download all the updates again, and it crashes again.

How can this be? I can't imagine a corrupt file; I reinstalled from fresh.

Is it the tri-monitor display that's doing it? It never caused a problem before.

I need help, please. I'm going through RPG withdrawl right now.

[JamSessionEin]

Small update.

I switched off two monitors and tried it on my left, smaller one, and it worked fine. Playonline didn't crash.

When, however, I tried to run it on the middle monitor, it locked the comp again, which suggests a driver problem to me, since my GeForce is hooked up to the middle monitor.

I'm working on getting the newest drivers now.

[JamSessionEin]

It's not a driver problem; I got the newest ones at nvidia.com for my GeForce, the game still crashes, only when it does, my menu breaks up into purple and green squares now.

[oni9]

could it be the internet connection lag problem?

I get crash as well, and it crashes when I access some functions like "Entering Chat Room" "activating Attack mode" "casting spell" etc

my switch hub flashes initially and stopped (no more move to my PS2) and few second later, everything freeze up including the music.

[AKosygin]

Oni2 wrote:

(no more move to my PS2)

while JamSessionEin wrote:

I'm using a Sony Vaio PC; 2Ghz,...

One is a PS2, the other is a PC, they are not related. And the problems are different.