Am I the only one who thinks that these random exits to the desktop in Skyrim without any kind of error message at all, either on screen or in the Event log, are weird? I mean Fallout 3 and Oblivion both had their fair share of crashes but they were crashes with proper error messages displayed on screen and in the Event log which meant that you at least had some starting point for trying to identify and fix them.

I've been playing Skyrim now for almost 140 hours and have encountered lots of glitches and bugs, more so than Oblivion in all honesty, but the one issue that annoys me more than any other is the way the game will randomly exit as if someone has just pressed Alt-F4 to quit immediately to the desktop. The Large Address Aware tweak and, later, the 4 GB Skyrim file *do* help significantly in reducing this issue but it does not stop them completely on my system. Generally, I can play for much longer periods if I use the 4 GB Skyrim file, as long as 30 hours in fact across several sessions, but the game will still occasionally exit within 15 minutes of loading it. I can't be 100% certain but they usually occur immediately or shortly after fast-travelling but some areas of the game seem to be more prone to this issue as well, e.g. I had two 'exits' in succession in Bonechill Passage with the original v1.1.121 build of the game. I'm playing on Ultra settings at 1920x1200 with 4xMSAA, FXAA and 16xAF forced through the driver. I'm not using any third-party mods at all and have only made a few minor tweaks to the Skyrim.INI file to blur the horribly low-res shadows more and improve the water quality.

Bethesda must know what causes this as the engine seems to be (unless I'm misunderstanding how code works) intentionally quitting before certain conditions are met that would causes a genuine crash or even a fatal blue screen. I've not seen that kind of behaviour in ANY other game; they either work perfectly or they crash with an error message. They don't just dump me back to the desktop without any explanation!

I've heard that Bethesda plan on patching the next build of Skyrim to be Large Address Aware but I do hope that isn't their only solution as it isn't a proper fix at all from my experiences. I think this issue above all others on the PC should be treat with the utmost priority as it seems to be an issue that effects most people playing this game at some point.

So what do others think? Are you happy with the 4 GB Skyrim file and the odd 'exit' or do you want it completely fixed with an explanation of why it happens in the first place?

My PC specs are: Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.6 GHz, ASUS P6T Deluxe v2209 motherboard, 6 GB 1,333 MHz DDR3 memory, NVIDIA GTX 580 graphics, Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer sound, 128 GB Crucial M225 SSD, 2 x 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 hard drives, 2 x Samsung BD-ROM/DVD rewriters, Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-bit)

It looks like they just wrapped their engine code in an exception handler that catches every possible failure and does nothing except exit to the desktop. Obviously can't do anything about bluescreens since those are OS/hardware level failures, but every crash that would display some sort of "Application has encountered an error..." message in Skyrim just exits to the desktop.

Still pretty strange for them to code the game that way, tzt, as it wouldn't have been very helpful during testing if there was no error message. It almost seems to me to be deliberate because Bethesda knew the game had a high tendency to crash otherwise. Or perhaps I'm just being paranoid?

Anyway, I'm not convinced that Bethesda tested the game thoroughly enough on 64-bit Windows as it seems to be a weak area for other publishers too. EA's technical support for example have admitted to me twice that they don't test their games on 64-bit Windows properly. Also the fact that the engine is limited to using just two threads which has been proven from benchmarks on various sites is odd, especially as the recommended specs list a quad-core CPU!

Personally, I think the game should have been delayed to fix bugs as it seems all three versions have serious issues: PC version has this random exit to desktop thing, the PS3 version suffers from major slowdown after prolonged play and the Xbox 360 version doesn't stream textures properly when installed to the hard drive. All those issues should have been picked up during testing but I suspect the committed 11/11/11 release date meant that Bethesda pushed the game out with known bugs. I've no proof of it but Oblivion was delayed six months to fix issues so it seems very plausible to me, particularly as releasing it at this time of year guarantees much higher sales.

The reason why a throw isn't coded leads me to believe that memory management and containers are not from any of Microsoft's libraries but custom crafted which isn't a fun or suggested method for data management. The STLs have plenty of error exceptions that throw leaving at least a meager explanation about the exception. The only way to see what is happening currently is to attach a debugger and with my own troubleshooting it is an access violation while moving or writing to a buffer. That is all I can offer.

Their development version was almost certainly built to handle things differently. Maybe they thought the error message looked scary for end users.

And 64-bit Windows goes into enough trouble to mimic 32-bit Windows for 32-bit apps any difference in behavior (as far as user applications can tell) is probably more of a Windows "feature".

Very interesting. You're obviously much more knowledgeable than I am but that information is certainly useful in that at least you know what causes it on your system. I trust you have forwarded this data to Bethesda as it must surely be beneficial for them in trying to isolate the cause of these exits to the desktop?

@tzt - Any error message is unnerving when a game crashes but personally I find it far more annoying that the game exits without any kind of error log. It means that I cannot contact Bethesda with a specific error message to help them find what causes this issue. At the very least I'd have expected a riendly "Ooops, this game has encountered a problem" window with a box to type what happened when it occurred so it could then be directly forwarded to the developers like what World of Warcraft has. I don't expect any game as complex or deep as Skyrim to be perfect but I do expect that it should give me some indication of why it quit and allow me to forward that data on to the developers. It is the 21st century after all.

I have to agree it is annoying. First few times I did it I was thinking my PC was bugged somehow as this is the first game that ever dumped to desktop with no message what-so-ever. Also odd that I can click steam and go right back into the game (from the last save) as if nothing happened.

The game really should log errors to the Event Viewer, at least, given the state it's in.

I've had the exact same CTD with Fallout 3 and, New Vegas too, as well as Skyrim doing it now too. Save often I guess. Luckily it doesn't seem too harsh on anything though I'm guessing it could potentially corrupt some saves at some point in time. It usually happens to me after a zone change.

From a programmer perspective I can understand why they didnt add that funcionality of giving proper error messages:

It takes a chips load of time to know where ur code is failing and hence make an error message. Hence no warnings

Basically ^

It's already corrupted all the saves for my first and my second character. At this rate I'm never going to have a proper playthrough. I'm still cool with that for the moment, but things have to improve at some point ...

This. Skyrim's the first game I've ever played that doesn't log anything to the Event Viewer. Given how useful those error reports can be for tracking down a faulty module/DLL file/whatever, and also given how Bethesda games and CTDs go together like peanut butter and jelly, I think it's sheer lunacy that they didn't enable error reporting.

I think we'd all have a lot better idea as to why the game's CTD'ing the way it is if we had proper reports to go on. As it is, I can only track it down to, "it only happens when I'm in the exterior world, not in dungeons or cities." Which is not very useful. Or maybe it only happens when Skyrim's decided I'm done playing Skyrim. It's hard to tell.

If nothing else, I hope a future patch also brings proper error reporting. Silent CTDs are not awesome.

Well, I'm going to be honest here...

search bar in Windows 7 type: regedit

or start-->run-->regedit

Navigate to: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\RADAR\HeapLeakDetection\DiagnosedApplications

look for TESV.exe

and yes, you will see all sorts of other software with memory leaks as well..they come in many different flavors.

Meh i only see one hexidecimal code and not any other message

It's something to do with one of two MSST REFRs. Here's a http://www.mediafire.com/myfiles.php#jmgh6cm729ul0 for that particular crash.

Edit: replaced ESM with esp so WryeBash won't choke on the ONAM list.