Game crash ONLY upon loading city

[MidwestSimGeek 0]

Hey all... My game is crashing out every time I try to load a city.  It starts up without any trouble, loads regions without any trouble, scrolls around through the region view without any trouble... then, every time I attempt to load a city, crashes out to the desktop after 5-10 seconds of the "Loading City" screen.  This happens with seemingly every type of city I've tried to load -- small, medium or large, empty tiles with no city started in them, cities from game-included regions I've never played, my own created cities, cities including funny NAM roads, cities NOT including funny NAM roads, you name it.

I'm running SC4 Deluxe, with the Network Addon Mod and a couple of the traffic/pathfinding plugins properly installed in my Plugins directory.  I don't have any custom lots, and no changes were made to my installation between the last functional run and the first problematic one.

Things I've already tried: Reboot, re-patch (though I already had the most recently patched EXE), page file size modifications, searching the HDD for a duplicate copy of the executable (the existence of which had caused me problems in the past)... None proved fruitful.

Machine specs: Intel P4 2.6Ghz, 768 MB RAM, Intel 82845G video card (64 MB), hard drive probably a nonissue (3 gigs free on the drive with SC4 installed), and page file 1536MB min / 2304MB max.

Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to provide... The beginning of the Exception Report for my most recent crash follows... I can post the list of loaded modules as well, if it proves necessary... I omitted it here because I wasn't sure how it would end up formatting in the post.

-----------------------------

Exception time: 04/25/2006, at 14:33:10.

Exception code: 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION.

Current thread ID: 388 (0x00000184).

Version information:

Application/module path: C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe

Application/module version name: SimCity 4

Application/module version: 1.1.638.0

System version: Windows NT 5.1

System memory: 768 Megabytes total, 172 Megabytes free.

Exception module:  C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe.

Exception address: 0x0075896b. Sectionffset: 0x01:0x0035196b.

Registers

   EAX: 054f8a7c

   EBX: 00000000

   ECX: 00000000

   EDX: 09442488

   ESI: 00b4cbb8

   EDI: 00001020

   CS:EIP: 001b:0075896b

   SS:ESP: 0023:0013fac8  EBP:00001830

   DS:0023  ES:0023  FS:003b  GS:0000

   Flags: 00010246

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Well, the ACCESS VIOLATION implies that the program tried to get to a location not allocated to the program.  This seems to be a catch-all for the general crash however.

Try moving all your plugins out of the game to a folder someplace else.  The desktop is as good as any to hold temporaries.  Then see if the game will load (with brown boxes, of course).

If it loads, you have a bad plugin.  You should then reinstall the NAM, and try it again.  If this works, try your plugins one by one.

If you have transportation mods that are not part of the NAM, do not try to run with them.  The NAM is incompatible with all other transportation mods.

[watterpipe1 0]

hi. i had the same problem until i laboriously took out one recent plug-in after another. when i deleted the diagonal edges mod (the one that gets rid of the jagged edges on your diagonal roads) , my city went back to normal. not a promise, but it might help.

[utora 0]

Do you have the cycledoggs and Jeroni's snowcapped mod installed? My game crashed to desktop precisely the same as yours. If I remember correctly, I deleted the columbus rocktextures because I wanted to install a pegasus rocktexture. Since an essential modfile was missing due to this, my game crashed to desktop.

The other time when my game crashed to desktop when trying to load a city, it was because I had used the waterfloramod, then uninstalled it, but I forgot to remove the waterplants I had plopped throughout the city's river. When you load a city without having removed the waterplants, the game crashes to desktop as well.

I think the main cause for your crash must be some mod that you used and forgot to remove some things you built, or you have deleted an essential file (coming with some terrainmod or otherwise), which causes your game to crash.
Hope this helps!

[jacqulina 162]

yes i think its to do with a bad mod or plugin but i havnt heard of pegs rock texture crashing it with cycledoggs mod i use pegs

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

On a second review of this problem, your page file might be just a little small.  Try setting (initial, maximum) to (2304, 4095).

Also, the space problem will be with the drive that has your My Documents folder.  All your regions are stored there, and the files are pretty large, and multi-extent.  Just to be on the safe side, you should run disk cleanup on that drive, then defragment it.