Hello all,
I'm just getting back into Morrowind with the GOTY edition for PC. Everything seems to run just fine, except that I get CTD during almost every battle. I have recently noticed that it will CTD faster if I am using something like a dagger and doing lots of quick attacks. I have tried several resolutions. Here is my current setup:

Windows 7 x64 Pro
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16 GHz
8 GB system memory
ATI Radeon HD 4870 with 1 GB video memory
HP 2710m with 1920 X 1080 res
Morrowind is the GOTY edition
Morrowind exe is set to run as admin, MGE installed (using best settings, but NOT distant lands), sound set to software mode

I'm a noob here, so if I can provide more info, just let me know what to include. Help is greatly appreciated.

Hi MalchiorX,
your system specs look pretty inconspicuous to me, save two things:
a) could you disable MGE (by simply renaming the two dx...dlls that MGE installs to something like dx...bak.
B) Software-Sound?! => you're using a socket 775 board. It has a built in sound-card. Please have a look into your MoBo's manual to get it working. This usually involves installing the driver (something like Azalia sound driver, Azalia-Codec...) and activating it via BIOS after you installed the drivers. You can then set the sound to "hardware accelerated".

While I am almost certain a) is not the culprit, B) could do the trick. There's plenty of folks around who play Mw happily with your config. - so it's certainly not your hardware or OS causing the trouble.

Thanks for the reply, Jack Pot. As you figured, disabling MGE didn't change anything. I changed the audio to hardware accel, but that seemed to cause CTD even faster. One interesting thing I noticed. It freezes for a moment, then the game continues, but I can not see the game. If I alt+tab and select morrowind, the window comes back up with the game running (and me getting my ass beat). But after another moment of battle, it will crash again for good and windows will report that morrowind stopped working. I don't suppose this shines a light on anything?

Well, that sheds some light on something - only I am not sure on what exactly :confused:

My thoughts here: Morrowind is a bit tetchy when it comes to sound. You won't even be able to start the game if you don't have a sound "device" of some description. Since CTDs happen only in Battle (where you'd have "Battle Music" and "Battle Sounds" being played) my guess would be one of these sound files being corrupt / not where it should be. But then I am also sure you reinstalled the game already...dunno :shrug:

Yeah, I reinstalled a couple of times and to different hard drives. I tried lots of tips from other forums, but this seems to be a real problem. My only other thoughts are that 1. Windows is trying to access or switch something in-game that causes the game to try and exit, 2. anti-virus or some other software that is active is causing the problem. This is so depressing because I really want to play again, especially with the graphics extender.

I read somewhere that the way the engine and drivers behave with MW causes most of the crashes. Regarding your sound card, I have gone to my DxSetup and turned off acceleration. Afterwards it played a lot better. Might give it a try.

Update:

So I tried turning off acceleration as Scarecrow suggested. I was able to play a little longer, but still unable to complete one battle. However, both Jackpot and Scarecrow suggested problems concerning sound, and I have read in other posts/forums that people were having trouble with CTD when the music changed. Mine wasn't happening when the music changed, but all signs seem to point to sound. So I removed the drivers for my on-board sound card and reinstalled them with drivers downloaded from the manufacturer website. Even though the driver revision was the same, it seems maybe my old driver was corrupted because as soon as i reinstalled the drivers, no more CTD. So that solves one problem.

I am able to run without frequent CTD as long as i keep MGE turned off and used morrowind default settings. I can run at the highest resolution no problem. Now if I activate MGE, I get CTD, though it is completely random as to it's timing (still lots during battle though). Also, even with the lowest settings on distant land, i drop from 80 fps to 30, always. Is distant land really that consuming? I think it's something else, because I set all settings to the highest and still get 25 fps. I guess I should ask if I need to move these requests to a new/different post?

Also, thanks Scarecrow and Jack Pot for your input, it is very much appreciated, especially since your suggestions led to fixing my problem.

Ha. I knew it! :celebration:
But then, there seems to be something wrong with your Graphics drivers as well:
I run the same CPU with 4GiB RAM on WinXP32. My Graphics card is a GTX 285.
With the default distant land settings provided by MGE I get fps in the 30s no problem, and this is with Vurt's Groundcover (animated grass all over) and a few shaders @1920*1440. Yes, MGE distant land needs a good graphics card - but it's no more demanding than, say, Oblivion.
More to the point, though: Morrowind itself is an exceptionally stable game. If any CTDs occur, then they are always plugin-related. You can play Morrowind with just Tribunal and Bloodmoon until you're blue in the face: I never had it crashing on me without plugins loaded.
So while the framerates you report are reasonable for a 4870 (it is about 20% slower, give or take, than the GTX 285) - Morrowind crashing is not.