Blue screen when running 2 clients on 1 box

I'm getting a blue screen every time after about 10 minutes of gameplay.

2 clients on 1 box with autohotkey. Both clients running on one widescreen monitor, windowed side to side.

Anyone else encounter this problem?

I'm hoping that someone found a simple solution because I'm out of ideas on what could be causing this problem. My system is fully updated and WoW has never blue screened for me before.

Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 165, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.5GHz
2048MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7900GT
SB Audigy 2 ZS Audio [D880]
Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2

Have you tried just running one instance of WoW?

Pull a stick of RAM and run one instance, testing to see if without a particular stick your computer doesn't BSD?

Have you defragged?

Checked to make sure all fans are working, especially CPU and GPU fans?

Made sure the video card isn't dirty?

Try running in non-windowed mode?

Is it exactly after 10 minutes, or could a particular location/action in game be the pattern?

My computer is pretty stable. That's why I'm not sure why I'm blue screening.

I've run one instance of WoW for probably hundreds of hours, as well as plenty of other games without getting blue screens. My RAM is rock solid and my fans/video card are fine. The drive with my game program files automatically defrags when idle.

I can only assume it has to do with the fact that I'm running 2 instances of WoW. This is the first time (I think) that I've ever run 2 windowed games at the same time.

If I run them non-windowed, then I can't see both screens at the same time which impacts my ability to play both characters. I'm not even sure autohotkey would work in that situation.

The 10 minutes is a totally guesstimate. I guess I shouldn't have been too precise. It blue screens after a short period of time.

Not suggesting you play in non-windowed ... purely creating test environments to determine where the failure is coming from. And since it crashes so soon after two windowed mode your game play is already nil. :?

So this only happened as soon as you started running two instances of WoW in Windowed Mode?

Are you running each client from it's own folder, or two instances of the [same] executable/folder location?

Each client is running in its own folder.

It's hard to tell what is causing the blue screen. It could even be possible that it's something related to autohotkey. I just remembered that when I first set up ingame macros, both toons were sitting in town for quite a long time without any problem.

It's when I run away from town and start questing that eventually I crashed.

I can't do any testing tonight because my computer is chugging on something in the background that I can't afford to lose. Tomorrow, I'll see what does happen if I run 1 fullscreen and have another instance running.

Well, I tried running both in fullscreen mode. Best I can say is that it didn't crash. But since I can't interact with the minimized client in any way, I think it's isolated from whatever might be causing my problem.

Autohotkey doesn't seem to mirror commands to a minimized client when another application is fullscreen.

Best I could do was set one toon on follow as I ran around killing random things for a while.


I do have a second box that I could use for dual boxing, but for just 2 toons, it's a lot simpler to stick to just one. My monitor layout is quite different from the norm since I use a 42" widescreen as my primary. It would have worked a lot better to use dual windowed.

Hmm....

Can you post up the error that you get off the blue screen?

If you can't see the blue screen for more than a split second or the thing just reboots instantly, here's how to change it so you can see what it says:

Start-->right-click My Computer-->Properties
Advanced tab
Click "Settings" in the "Startup and Recovery" section
Uncheck the "Automatically Restart" box in the "System Failure" section

Then write it all down. Also, if you're really stuck, do this:

In the Startup and Recovery options page mentioned above, change the default drop-down from "Small memory dump (64k)" to Kernel or Complete.
Go into "C:\Windows" and find the file MEMORY.DMP
ZIP or RAR it down to manageable size.
Upload it to filefront or an FTP site somewhere.
Send us the link.

If you can get that far, someone can probably pull it and run it through Windbg and give you a better idea for what's failing. I can do a stack trace on it but suspect I won't be able to get all the way to root cause.

Now I'm more confused. After making the changes suggested in the above post, I could no longer trigger a blue screen.

Started up both clients to find that my 2nd account trial for expansion had expired. (Yes, I made BE's. All of my other toons are undead, so I wanted a change) So I made 2 new undead to test.

I ran around newbie area and Brill, killing things and generally making a fool of myself to everyone around for almost 30 minutes. No problems, no blue screen.

Maybe it is something specific to the Blood Elf area that was causing the blue screen. It had blue screened every time (4 times) before in a fairly short period of time before I posted in this forum.

Thanks for the advice so far. If I decide to buy another copy of the expansion to play the BE's, I'll post again if I encounter the blue screen again.

I have seen posts from folks that had problems with one character that was logged out in a particular zone but not on other characters elsewhere. I do not recall that they had BSOD problems, though. It was usually Error 132 or just crash to desktop.