Strange boot camp crash...

I'm attempting to run City of Heroes under Win XP in Bootcamp. The Bootcamp partition is generally working just fine as I play lots of other games there like Civ 4, Oblivion, EQ2, Anarchy Online, etc... City of Heroes however crashes during character creation if I don't have the game running in Safe Mode. The game pauses for a couple of seconds and then the music comes back but the game is completely non-responsive.

The strangest part is that once I give the game the 3 finger send off, the RealTek audio icon in the system tray pops up a notification indicating that something has been plugged into the audio jack. Any thoughts on this? Thanks in advance.

The first clue is that the game doesn't crash in safe mode. That almost always points to a driver issue in Windows. You didn't say which Machine you're using but you should be able to update video and sound drivers in Windows XP by going to the device maker's web site and downloading the latest drivers they have posted.

Regards.

OK... Anyone know exactly what driver to download for the Early 2008 series Mac Pro? I see a "Realtek High Definition Audio" device in the control panel.

Well... I poked around on the website for Realtek until I found what I think are the correct drivers. I downloaded and installed these drivers and everything looks fine except for CoH. This game still crashes exactly as it did before the driver update. I confirmed the driver update by looking at the driver properties in the control panel and they have a 10/13/2008 date, so these are definitely the most recent drivers available.

Any other thoughts?

You and me both.

I'm having the same problem with an early 2008 24" iMac Alum. I also updated the Realtek drivers and the problem has persisted, though only (so far) in Civ 4 and Sword of the Stars. F.E.A.R. and Half-Life 2 run fine.

At the moment, I think the problem isn't the Realtek drivers per se but the Microsoft HD audio drivers accessible under system devices in the hardware settings menu of the system control panel. Try disabling those and see if the game will stop crashing. Not a permanent solution, even if it works, but at least we'll be closing in on the culprit.