LOTRO Crashes and reboots Windows 10 pc at any moment once client is running

[LOTRBrigg]

Hello.

I am hoping that you can help me figure out why my pc is rebooting but only while running LOTRO and it can happen at any stage of the game no matter what I am doing or where I am or which server I am playing on or any of the characters I created.

I have been trying to figure this out for over a month without success. I have tried many different suggestions until I finally installed a fresh Windows 10 and redownloaded and installed the game again from scratch but the issue remains.

The latest thing I have discovered is that although I am running 64 bit Windows 10 and have verified that the client Options show 64 bit ticked and also the UserPreferences.ini file shows GameClientType=3, when I start the client and check Task Manager the process shows LOTRO (32) bit. I believe this is somehow the issue but I have no idea how to change that or fix it, hence my dilemma.

Can someone please help me with this issue? I am so tired of the game crashing and restarting my pc at any given time. It is SO frustrating!!

Thank you for any help!!!

Brig

[StinkyGreene]

System failure. Could be a host of system issues. Whats the load on the CPU right before the reboot? Whats the temperature? For starters, turn off Automatic Restart during System Failure in the system preferences so you can diagnose better.

[LOTRBrigg]

System failure. Could be a host of system issues. Whats the load on the CPU right before the reboot? Whats the temperature? For starters, turn off Automatic Restart during System Failure in the system preferences so you can diagnose better.

Hi and thanks for the response! This issue only recently started occurring and only after installing and running LOTRO. I play heavier games that tax the cpu/memory/system much more than LOTRO, Like ARK-Survival Evoloved and a host of other games but none do this. I did install a fresh copy of Windows 10 and LOTRO with nothing else and the issue remained. I think that rules out the temperature and CPU usage. My main concern is that Task Manager thinks LOTRO is running in 32 bit while everything else says it is running in 64 bit. I just don't know how to fix that issue. I will turn off auto reboot but so far no dumps have been kicked out for the reboots and Event Viewer only lists a critical issue and says Windows closed abnormally for an unknown reason. Very helpful. LOL

Thanks again!

Brig

[Halphast]

When you open your launcher, before you even log in, click the arrow button (3rd from the right) and click Options. There you can set it to run 64-bit, which it should. My windows-10 computer also used to crash a lot, although it didn't crash the computer itself. You mentioned the 64-bit issue so I knew how to answer that- but other potential reasons are better left to others who know more

[LOTRBrigg]

When you open your launcher, before you even log in, click the arrow button (3rd from the right) and click Options. There you can set it to run 64-bit, which it should. My windows-10 computer also used to crash a lot, although it didn't crash the computer itself. You mentioned the 64-bit issue so I knew how to answer that- but other potential reasons are better left to others who know more

Hi and thanks for responding!!

Yes I have gone into Options and made sure it was set to 64 bit and not either of the 32 bit settings. I have also opened the UserPreferences.ini file and made sure the GameClientType was set to =3 which is 64 bit. These settings have always been 64 bit as well as my Windows 10 pc. Still, when I open the client and check Task Manager, it shows the LOTRO process as (32 bit). This is very strange. I have put in a ticket as well and hopefully SSG can help with this issue. I have read that 32 bit cannot use the same amount of memory as 64 bit so I assume that is what is happening and just restarts the pc to correct itself. No other program does this and it only started after installing and running LOTRO. Sad times...

Anyway, thank for your help!!

Brig

[Halphast]

Sorry I couldn't offer more- I would also suggest you join the Lotro Community Discord: https://discord.gg/48kG4bcz

They have a tech-support thread that a lot of really knowledgeable people read. You're likely to get a bunch of solutions in a short time.

[LOTRBrigg]

Sorry I couldn't offer more- I would also suggest you join the Lotro Community Discord: https://discord.gg/48kG4bcz

They have a tech-support thread that a lot of really knowledgeable people read. You're likely to get a bunch of solutions in a short time.

Thanks very much for taking the time to reply and help me!! I have been dealing with this for a while now but not everyone will know about the Options window settings so thanks for that AND the Discord info!! I am heading there now to sign up! I will post a fix as soon as I learn how and hopefully I can help others with this same issue!

Thanks again, Halphast!!

Brig

[JustDooIt]

Thanks very much for taking the time to reply and help me!! I have been dealing with this for a while now but not everyone will know about the Options window settings so thanks for that AND the Discord info!! I am heading there now to sign up! I will post a fix as soon as I learn how and hopefully I can help others with this same issue!

Thanks again, Halphast!!

Brig

Same boat here. There is something wrong with the 64-bit client. was working flawlessly until a recent update to the game. I tried re-installing the game but no luck on resolving the lockup in game or after character selection. Had to log out of the computer to get back to windows. There is a Alt-Tab switching problem in the game engine that prevents going back to the desktop properly. I am going to try to reinstall the game on the main drive and fall back on the NVIDIA driver to the May release. Other games work as well

AMD Ryzen9 5900x
NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3090 FE
32GB Corsair DDR4 - 3200 RAM

[LOTRBrigg]

Same boat here. There is something wrong with the 64-bit client. was working flawlessly until a recent update to the game. I tried re-installing the game but no luck on resolving the lockup in game or after character selection. Had to log out of the computer to get back to windows. There is a Alt-Tab switching problem in the game engine that prevents going back to the desktop properly. I am going to try to reinstall the game on the main drive and fall back on the NVIDIA driver to the May release. Other games work as well

AMD Ryzen9 5900x
NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3090 FE
32GB Corsair DDR4 - 3200 RAM

Hi Justdoit,

I have learned a few things while troubleshooting my issue. There are 2 places to check for 64 bit usage in LOTRO that I know of. Under the Options setting when the client is loaded using the unmarked down arrow at the top and making sure that 64 bit is ticked and not either of the 32 bit options and also in the Documents/TheLordoftheRingsOnline/ folder look for the file, UserPreferences.ini. Open it with notepad and look for the line, GameClientType=#, The # will be 1, 2 or 3. The 1 & 2 are 32 bit and the 3 is 64 bit. Also look for files, UserPreferences64.ini and UserPreferences64.ini.bak. From what I understand the first one has been superceeded by UserPreferences.ini and should not be used but check them to make sure of that. The .bak is the old one no longer used but if it has the .ini file then I think renaming it is necessary to stop it from conflicting with the right one.

Other than that I had to make sure Windows 10 was running in 64 bit mode which it is but, and I believe this is my issue, when I run the LOTRO client and everything is in 64 bit mode, I bring up Task Manager in Windows and it says LOTRO Client (32 bit). It is beyond me why it thinks it is running 32 bit client when all other options and settings say 64 bit. I am still waiting to hear back from SSG Tech Support and I will post updates here for all to see.

Good luck!

Brig

[JustDooIt]

I reverted back to the NVIDIA driver from last May and the game works.

[LOTRBrigg]

I reverted back to the NVIDIA driver from last May and the game works.

That's awesome! Glad you got it to work! I heard back from SSG today and answered questions and sent them system and dxdiag info. Hopefully they can help. I will post with the outcome.

Take care and have fun!

Brig

[Slingshooter]

I have the same problem. AMD Vega 64 GPU, Ryzen 2700 cpu, m2 ssd, windows 11. No other game crashes, lotro crashes without failure after 15-30 minutes of gameplay. Crashes my computer and forces it to restart. I've experimented with a lot of things, next i'll try to delete the cache folder for lotro and disable lotro from accessing it, if that does nothing I'll try dx9 instead of 11. Will report if successfull.

[Slingshooter]

I have the same problem. AMD Vega 64 GPU, Ryzen 2700 cpu, m2 ssd, windows 11. No other game crashes, lotro crashes without failure after 15-30 minutes of gameplay. Crashes my computer and forces it to restart. I've experimented with a lot of things, next i'll try to delete the cache folder for lotro and disable lotro from accessing it, if that does nothing I'll try dx9 instead of 11. Will report if successfull.

Update: A couple of hours of gameplay and no crashes. Deleting the folder Cachepath found in "Documents\The Lord of the Rings Online\CEF" and setting the game to use dx9 seemed to do the trick for me.

[Slingshooter]

Update: A couple of hours of gameplay and no crashes. Deleting the folder Cachepath found in "Documents\The Lord of the Rings Online\CEF" and setting the game to use dx9 seemed to do the trick for me.

Update: It started crashing again next day for some reason. So now I've tried to to block lotro from accessing Cachepath using windows defenders folder protection, but then lotro could not access documents at all, because it is protected by default and you can't remove it. As a result I just moved the "documents" folder to another disk, D:\documents as opposed to default C: drive, as a result lotroclientx64 can access documents since it no longer resides in the folders protected by default, but still have access denied to cachepath. It seems to be working fine for now...

[Slingshooter]

Update: It started crashing again next day for some reason. So now I've tried to to block lotro from accessing Cachepath using windows defenders folder protection, but then lotro could not access documents at all, because it is protected by default and you can't remove it. As a result I just moved the "documents" folder to another disk, D:\documents as opposed to default C: drive, as a result lotroclientx64 can access documents since it no longer resides in the folders protected by default, but still have access denied to cachepath. It seems to be working fine for now...

After some more troubleshooting I've come to these conclusions (this cache "solution" above has nothing to do with it, I sidetracked to that solution because when I was playing AC: Valhalla it would crash and preventing it from accessing the cache fixed it)

dx11 causes a system crash or reboot
dx9 works fine
IF i install the 2015-17-19 C++ Redistributable package, the game runs fine in dx11. For hours and hours on end. BUT, and this is so weird it's making my head explode, IF I RESTART MY PC after installing the c++ red. package and launch the game it will crash again in about 10 minutes.

[Oghran]

Have you tried looking at Window's Event viewer for something significant around the time of the crashes?
Are any .dmp files created in Windows\Minidump?

[Slingshooter]

Have you tried looking at Window's Event viewer for something significant around the time of the crashes?
Are any .dmp files created in Windows\Minidump?

For me a kernel-power id 41 pops up, as well as DistributedCOM id 10010

No minidump folder.

edit: also found whea-logger id 18, in some other microsoft/amd support threads this points to driver/gpu overlock instability. I just think it's weird that I can run more demanding games, get higher temperatures and not crash. Sigh...

[conell]

I've been having the same issue. Game crashes indiscriminately - the screen goes black and no signal message appears - then the hard drives spins and there is a need to reboot. The first thing I though was over heating so I cleaned out the inside and now the innards are as clean of dust as when I first unboxed the computer. Turned VPN on and off - turned anti-virus on and off - tuned fire wall on and off. Once I came across this thread I tired many of the tweaks here and have changed NVIDIA drivers a number of times all to no effect. I've been playing LOTRO since open Beta 14 years ago but this problem is making the game somewhat unplayable as I can never be sure when a crash will happen. I did think of trying to go to Windows 11 - has anyone done this?

[Oghran]

For me a kernel-power id 41 pops up, as well as DistributedCOM id 10010

No minidump folder.

edit: also found whea-logger id 18, in some other microsoft/amd support threads this points to driver/gpu overlock instability. I just think it's weird that I can run more demanding games, get higher temperatures and not crash. Sigh...

The kernel-power 41 comes up on reboot after a crash, the DCOM one probably has to do with UWP apps, an arguably failed attempt for cross-platform apps. Neither are relevant.

The whea-logger one is more interesting. Did you choose a high performance profile in your GPU setup, or have something else vaguely overclockish? If so it might be useful to play around with that.

[Oghran]

I've been having the same issue. Game crashes indiscriminately - the screen goes black and no signal message appears - then the hard drives spins and there is a need to reboot. The first thing I though was over heating so I cleaned out the inside and now the innards are as clean of dust as when I first unboxed the computer. Turned VPN on and off - turned anti-virus on and off - tuned fire wall on and off. Once I came across this thread I tired many of the tweaks here and have changed NVIDIA drivers a number of times all to no effect. I've been playing LOTRO since open Beta 14 years ago but this problem is making the game somewhat unplayable as I can never be sure when a crash will happen. I did think of trying to go to Windows 11 - has anyone done this?

I did two things on my box:
- added a little virtual memory after I found some Resource-Exhaustion warnings (not errors) in Event Viewer
- reverted to a previous WHQL certified Nvidia driver (last - 1).

One or both did help in my situation, haven't had a crash in weeks, while I had several per day before. Ymmv.

[Polymachos]

What do you mean with virtual memory, the swap file of Windows itself? This should be kept active under any circumstances, as it is a vital part of the way Windows works. Think of a cabinet completely filled with cardboard boxes that you have to re-arrange, but are not allowed to use the floor to place them onto while the process is going on. Or a Tower of Hanoi without the third rod. It cannot be done by following the rules. Windows has internal rules, too.

By the way: I once bought a re-labeled netbook, actually a MSI Wind u100, which would stop running Windows XP like out of nothing, when using it. I checked what was going on, and found that the swap file was deactivated. Went to the shop where I had got it, and warned them to not deliver it in that condition to other customers which are less experienced, no matter how much precious hard disk space that might save.


Greetings, Polymachos

[Oghran]

Virtual memory / swapfile is used when a machine is short on real memory. It then dumps some memory into the swapfile and re-uses it. As long as you do not run out of real memory, there shouldn't be anything in it.

It used to be a standard performance tweak to disable it on boxes with plenty of memory, as a swapfile lives on disk which is a lot slower than memory. In the early days of SSDs the advise was to disable it as well, for fear of increased wear on the then very expensive devices and to avoid the poor performance SSDs had when rewriting. I've run my boxes without it since XP days without problems. It is only recently that I noticed problems correlating with low virtual memory warnings. Why Windows currently decides it wats to write to swap when there is plenty of memory to go around is beyond me. I hope it will get fixed.

But for now it seems you are right: Windows is not happy without virtual memory, even when your cupboard is half empty.

[Slingshooter]

For me a kernel-power id 41 pops up, as well as DistributedCOM id 10010

No minidump folder.

edit: also found whea-logger id 18, in some other microsoft/amd support threads this points to driver/gpu overlock instability. I just think it's weird that I can run more demanding games, get higher temperatures and not crash. Sigh...

Update: Want to shed some light on my problem (which is AMD-related btw)

So my troubleshooting has led me to this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/com...erarchy_error/

cache hierarchy error = Whea-logger id 18

If the thread gets removed here's a basic rundown if any unlucky soul manages to find their way to this thread:
* Basically amd drivers/bios/chipset are plagued with instability
* Disable c-states in bios
* Make sure your PSU is directly connected to the wall
* Disable PBO for AMD CPU

and here's a LTT video somewhat covering a similar issue (random system crash/reboot on amd systems) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EYLzD2GytA

[JiiPee]

Update: Want to shed some light on my problem (which is AMD-related btw)

So my troubleshooting has led me to this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/com...erarchy_error/

cache hierarchy error = Whea-logger id 18

If the thread gets removed here's a basic rundown if any unlucky soul manages to find their way to this thread:
* Basically amd drivers/bios/chipset are plagued with instability
* Disable c-states in bios
* Make sure your PSU is directly connected to the wall
* Disable PBO for AMD CPU

and here's a LTT video somewhat covering a similar issue (random system crash/reboot on amd systems) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EYLzD2GytA

Did your crashing stopped after you disabled C-States and PBO?

I have:
- Vega 56
- R7 5800X
- 32GB mem
- Win 11

And somewhere around last summer I started to get this crashing, I think around similar time what some other people have already pointed out.

I have try a lot of stuff, also disabling PBO and no help. C-States should be only issue with older gen ryzens, 3000 series and up should not have issues with c-states anymore.

And as others have already pointed out, it's hard crash. Computer just reboots and nothing really gets logged in system logs. I have run memory test, they pass. I can run GPU stress test just fine, no issues. I can hammer CPU hard and no issues, only with lotro I get randomly crash. Sometimes it takes hours, sometimes it can crash very fast when I log in to game.
It also doesnt matter what I am doing in game. I can be in raid and I crash. Sometimes it just crash when I stand idling front of the vault keeper.

I also did clean install of windows and it didn't help anything.

Before this crashing started, I never had any issues with lotro.

[Slingshooter]

Did your crashing stopped after you disabled C-States and PBO?

I have:
- Vega 56
- R7 5800X
- 32GB mem
- Win 11

And somewhere around last summer I started to get this crashing, I think around similar time what some other people have already pointed out.

I have try a lot of stuff, also disabling PBO and no help. C-States should be only issue with older gen ryzens, 3000 series and up should not have issues with c-states anymore.

And as others have already pointed out, it's hard crash. Computer just reboots and nothing really gets logged in system logs. I have run memory test, they pass. I can run GPU stress test just fine, no issues. I can hammer CPU hard and no issues, only with lotro I get randomly crash. Sometimes it takes hours, sometimes it can crash very fast when I log in to game.
It also doesnt matter what I am doing in game. I can be in raid and I crash. Sometimes it just crash when I stand idling front of the vault keeper.

I also did clean install of windows and it didn't help anything.

Before this crashing started, I never had any issues with lotro.

Install 19.12.2 drivers https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/re...ad-win-19-12-2

Do a clean uninstall with DDU in safemode then reboot to install the 2019 drivers, also make sure to prevent windows update from "silently" updating your gpu-drivers - I believe there's a box you can check in DDU. You might also have to make some changes in windows registry (regedit) to bulletproof this update-prevention.