hi,

my W:A has behaved for more than a year without the color going all neon and messed up, but only recently has started up again. every 5 minutes or so--i believe at a pretty constant rate, for some reason--the colors get all messed up and i have to minimize to fix them, and, almost always, they get messed up immediately upon bringing the game back up, where a second minimize then fixes it. but it's annoying to minimize it two times every 5 minutes while playing online, of course. (and occasionally 3 times will be necessary) i haven't made any changes to my system or installed any new programs around the time that this started happening. any ideas how to fix it? thanks

EDIT: I have windows xp

It's not installing new software that causes this, it's having stuff open while running the game; messengers, media players of all sorts, firewalls, antivirus solutions, fancy desktop theme managers...

Check your WA folder for a file called palette.log and open it with Notepad. It isn't always created, I believe, but it might have been. It should hold the name of the thieving application.

It would also help to know what OS you're using. I'm guessing Windows XP, but still.

wowwwww that's so cool, that palette file. it's dated and timed and everything, for every time the color's messed up! i'm surprised the game takes note of stuff like that!

thanks for telling me about it=)

i use windows xp, and as for the stuff i have open, such as security programs, the thing is that i had them open for months without the discoloration, which is why it feels like it's not their fault that the problem suddenly came back

the only two processes labeled there are csrss.exe and cidaemon.exe. I googled about them, and found that they shouldn't be terminated, but i already owned a program that seems to be for fixing those processes if they've gone bad, so hopefully that'll do the trick

thanks=)

unfortunately the program i tried didn't fix the csrss.exe problem. i made a forum Search of csrss.exe, but no working solutions were mentioned in the two found threads. anyone know what i should do? the palette's being taken by the system process csrss.exe

http://forum.team17.co.uk/showthread.php?t=33082&highlight=csrss.exe
http://forum.team17.co.uk/showthread.php?t=35497&highlight=csrss.exe

uninstall vista.

cidaemon.exe is in no way critical for your computer's stability - if you don't use the Vista instant search it's of no use to you. Worth a try if terminating it gets rid of your problem.

i think that did it!!:eek: i played a 7-minute game or so, and the discoloration never lets me play that long without it=) i'll let you know if it rears its ugly head ahead

thanks cybershadow! i found it odd that that seems to have done it, because my palette file only mentioned that program a few times, whereas it mentioned csrss.exe hundreds of times, but it looks like it was the case

oh i have windows xp, not vista, sorry i should've said that in the front post. i think cidaemon.exe is simply the 'Allow Indexing Service' for searching for files. i turned it off so now i probably don't even have to manually terminate cidaemon.exe everyday, after turning that option off. or so i assume

thanks!!=D

I'm also running into the same problem under Vista 32-bit. Furthermore, I've found it has something to do with changing resolutions. If I start the game up and keep it in 640x480, there is absolutely no problem in-game. But I find the game unplayable at such a low resolution (not to mention it looks rather bad on my LCD w/ native 1440x900). So, if I set the resolution to anything different and start up a game, I get either the crazy neon colors or almost everything is black, except for worms and barrels, which are a strange greenish color. Minimizing the game and bringing it back into focus fixes this, somehow. I saw mention of this working for someone else in another thread.

My palette.log file shows csrss.exe as being the offending process that is messing with WA's colors (there are no others). Since this process can't be killed, is there any other way of forcing either the operating system or the game to give WA full control over the color palette?

I have an Nvidia 8600GTS with the latest drivers - seems Nvidia users are having a lot of problems around here.

Have you tried the workaround of having the W:A folder open in Explorer while the game is running?

Yeah CyberShadow, I just tried that and it didn't seem to have any effect on it (crazy neon everywhere). With that, I have both crss.exe AND explorer.exe listed in palette.log.

I've also read elsewhere that you need to run the game in one of the compatibility modes if you're using Vista, but I've tried all of them to no avail. Any other ideas?:confused:

Have you tried turning all of Vista's advanced graphical effects off before launching the game? I believe you can specify that in the properties of the shortcut you're using for each program separately, but it wouldn't hurt to disable them completely, restart the computer and run the game before doing anything else.

csrss.exe shouldn't technically have anything to do with Aero and the fancy effects, I know, but since the game does work for some people...

Yeah, I'm actually using the Windows Classic theme because it just looks cleaner to me (not to mention the system feels more responsive than with Aero). Maybe I should *enable* Aero and try running W:A, just for giggles. I'll give it a try and update this with any news.

Vista users: I find running DreamScene (Ultimate only) can cause pallete lock. Hope that helps someone :) Aero does work, I did it just now :P

Also, I find that the first time you start a game the pallete will become corrupted. Running any other games after that is fine though.