2 Blue screens of death

[Unbalanced]

Hi folks. I've been doing a little bit of research on this for a week now. I'll just sorta fill you in on what I've found and you can choose to do with what you will. (and no I don't have a real solution, this is just information)

The common thing among all this is Maple Story. More specifically gameguard. Gameguard by nProtect is somewhat well known as a rootkit. ( Don't freak out just yet, cuz rootkits aren't exactly evil all the time. All it does is hide processes in this instance) If you've done a bit of digging, you'd know that gameguard sort of hijacks your kernel processes. Ok I don't know if hijacking is actually accurate, but what it does is kill your kernel and replaces it with one of it's own. Allowing it to have pretty much full access to your system. Now this new fake kernel pretty much has say over what can and can't be done on your system somewhat (this is to prevent hacks in short).

When gg starts up, it will create a temporary file (what everyone sees as dump_wmimmc.sys) sets up its hooks and then boot the game. If for any reason gg sees something it considers "threatening" it will call for a reboot.

The crash you experience when quitting the game I believe starts out when the temp file is cancelled, yet the hooks remain.

There's not really anything you can do as it's pretty much up to nProtect to fix this problem. Its not so much maple story as it is gameguard. I've had this problem for a long time just that it didn't get serious until the BSODs. I think what clued me in was when my device drivers started crashing like crazy (bluetooth stacks etc.) Even with yesterday's latest patch, nothing is to be done. In fact, gameguard now thinks my logitech game profiler is malicious and will force a shutdown of the game.

I know not everyone is experiencing this, but from some of the systems I've tested, it seems to be affecting specifically windows xp sp2. I've tried this on windows 2000 with sp2, sp3 and sp4 installed as well as windows xp with sp1 and sp2 installed.

Well that's what I've discovered so far and if there are any corrections to be made, please correct me.

Oh and just so you know, there is a known vulnerability involved with nProtect gameguard which does allow malicious code to be injected into your system.

As great as "free" games go, maple is one of them. But there is no way I am going to continue with it anymore because of nProtect software. Or any game using nProtect. (this was supposed to prevent hacking, but has been nothing short of failure. What is the point when gg can easily be circumvented by hackers?) I suppose the intent was good, just the execution was horrendous.

Companies like wiznet and nprotect seem to only care if it affects their bottom line (try contacting them and you will see what I mean). So your cries will go in vain until a large portion of their paying players start quitting. I spend what most people consider way too much money on games etc. and I can tell you, these guys aren't going to get my money.

[Xenethyl]

Thanks for the information everyone, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only person experiencing this problem.

In my case, I began having problems with Maple Story about a week ago when I would randomly be kicked from the game and presented with error 230 from GameGuard, which said that it had failed to initialize. After countless reinstallations on two different drives, I still experienced the problem. Only this week has it gotten worse in that I am now experiencing the reboots that everyone has previously mentioned. Currently I am unable to load Maple Story as it wants to patch (I assume a new version was released by Wizet in the past two days) but instead my machine performs an involuntary reboot (presumably due to GameGuard).

Based on what everyone has been saying, does anyone think it is possible that we are all running a common process that GameGuard doesn't like? I'm currently running XP SP1, so I don't think it's an isolated issue (in regards to Unbalanced's post). I've also tried to load the game in safe mode but have had no success (though it doesn't force me to reboot). Lastly, I too have updated to the latest drivers for my video card (Catalyst 6.6's with an X800 Pro). Short of pleading our case to GameGuard, what is our next move?