[kevinh]

I've gone into detail about the problem on other threads, but basically Launcher.exe quits as a mission reaches 100% loading. Event viewer says the problem is an unhandled exception in .net framework. A secondary issue is exiting the game from the main menu (or auto-restarting after changing graphics settings) does not stop Launcher.exe. The thing is bugged.

I was running the game quite happily on Win XP SP3 pre-patch. If you have any suggestions I will gladly try them. Some members here say XP is the problem. My answer to that is the game is supposed to be compatible with XP SP3 and if the patch makes it incompatible, the patch has a bug and should be fixed. If they can't make the current version work on XP then they should make the previous version available to download. No way would I consider upgrading to Win 7 without some official confirmation from 1C that XP is no longer compatible. But I don't think they will ever say that. That would be admitting their software does not meet their own specification.

I can understand they want to stop development on this and move to the next version, but that's flawed decision making, as well as bad commercially. On the face of it it's an attractive idea. But they'll only end up biting off more than they can economically chew yet again. Also there was always the chance that no matter how well tested the patch was, it won't work for everyone. In which case they should hang around and fix it before cutting us loose. I think it's a sick joke to release a major update like this and just run away.

All would not be lost if I could roll back my game to the previous version. But because updates are handled by Steam I can't.