Diablo II - Unhandled Exception: Access Violation {c000005}

[Ferrick]

So I finally end ACT II and I go onto ACT 3. Walked around Kurest (spelling?) and decided to save and exit. I come back 3 hours later to continue play and the screen loads until I click on my character. When I do it freezes and I get this warning: UNHANDLED EXCEPTION_ACCESS VIOLATION {c000005} I tried several times but nothing has worked.

I did research and it seems this was a major headache that Blizzard had trouble correcting back in the early days of release (2000 to 2002). The issues ranged from IRQ conflicts to background tasks to low RAM to nVidia driver conflicts to underpowered power supplies , etc.

Well my socket 939 with XP Pro w/SP 2 has 2 gigs of RAM, a 550 watt psu, a connect3D X800 GTO 256 meg vid card (ATI), etc., more than meets the requirements and it certainly isn't demanding of my system.

Prior to all this I had no issues playing the game. Because Blizzard in their infinite wisdom failed to provide a save system whereby one could return to an earlier save I am basically stuck where I am at.

Any ideas on what I can do? Everything I have researched is dated to the first half of this decade. Help would truly be appreciated.

* One other thing: I have had the expansion installed fromthe beginning and I patched with the veray latest and last patch available.

[Siberys]

Is it a new CD or a used CD, any of the ones you used to install the game that is?

Sometimes even a minor scratch on a CD could mean that part of a file might not get transferred.

[Ferrick]

It is brand new game with brand new disks. I did even further research and the bottom line is this issue is a perpetual one. It doesn't matter if you have the best of PC hardware or the latest patches or drivers because it strikes even the newest machines. Since 2000 Blizzard has yet to rectify the problem which squarly resides in their coding. One would think that one of the many patches they released for this game would have corrected the issue. Anyway...

Here is what I had to do to rectify the problem:

1. Transfer my saved game to another folder.
2. Uninstall the game and delete the Diablo folder.
3. Run CheckDisk which took some time.
4. Run defragment.
5. Reinstall the game.
6. Patch the game.

* It worked but if I have to go through this again I might just leave it uninstalled!