Saving causes SC4 to freeze

[meking704 0]

I've had SC4 for years and have never run into the problem I'm having today after installing the game once again and I have no clue what could be causing this problem.  I've re-installed the game a 2nd time and tried it both before and after installing the most recent patch, but the problem is the same in either case. 

When I save a city the music stops and the game locks up.  Ctrl+alt+del doesn't do anything so the only option is to reboot my computer.  I've been racking my brain all day what the problem could be but I have no clue.  I tried increasing my virtual memory, something I've never had to do to get SC4 to run in the past, and as I guessed it had no effect.  My computer has a gig of ram, and while its never run the game as smooth as I would prefer, it has always been able to run it with crashes mostly on the rare side.  There have been a few times when the game would freeze while saving, but I found it usually is only when I save when exiting to the region.  Saving while staying in the city almost always works, but for some reason it isn't this time.

Does anybody have any ideas what the issue could be?  Like I said the hardware I'm using has run the game just fine in the past and I've never had to tweak any settings for the game to run, so it doesn't make much sense why it won't work now. 

[Ryan123220 18]

hey, ive never had problems with saving the game ether, my computer died so i had to install sc4 on my other computer and the other day i saved my game and it did the same, i figured it was just crappy luck and left it since i never use the save game button anyways, im not sure what is causing this problem but at the time that this problem occured i had very few plugins, the new NAM and a few old ones that i had before. the only thing i can think is maybe the new NAM has a bug in it? It might not be that but that is my only guess right now.

[meking704 0]

I haven't installed any plug-ins, I've only installed the most recent update.  You don't have the issue anymore?  What plug-ins did you install now that its working?

[Yuu Caa Sim 55]

Have you turned off ALL background tasks (including antivirus, internet browsers, messenger programs, program updaters, anything and everything)? Some need to be turned off in the task manager (ctrl alt del)

Does this happen to all your cities?

If your cities are from your old install, are you sure there aren't any custom content in them from before?

Have you tried quick saving? (by pressing [ctrl] + [alt] + I believe)

[helloworldsimcity 0]

If you got a big city and a big region, it's gonna take a long time to save and load the region. Have you tried putting all graphics settings to low and unchecked all boxes?

[meking704 0]

I figured out the problem, zone alarm, once again, was the source of my computer problems. I really need a better firewall!

I got it fixed now, just had to change some settings and its saving without any issues now. Now I'm off to download NAM because that is completely new to me. To think, I almost gave up on this game!

[chris0101 8]

There needs to be a new patch for this ... sadly EA games gave up on this game altogether.