<\/p>\n

A couple nights ago, I decided to reinstall Thief 3: Deadly Shadows and give it another spin. The only catch: I’m running Windows Vista, and old games can be very iffy on this OS.<\/p>\n

My problem was that after installing, any time I tried to run the game, I got the following error:<\/p>\n

(Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library)
\nRuntime Error!
\nProgram: C:\\Program Files\\Thief – Deadly Shadows\\System\\t3.exe
\nabnormal program termination<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When this happened, the cursor would get stuck as a spinning CD, which normally indicates that the computer is accessing the CD. Only this time, it would stay that way until I restarted the machine. I don’t think I could open the CD tray either.<\/p>\n

After a few hours of mucking about, I finally got the thing to run, even though some parts are a bit buggy. I figured I’d share all the steps I took to get it to run in Vista. I’m fairly sure that not all of these steps were necessary, but I’ll list everything I did just in case.<\/p>\n

1-<\/strong> First, I should mention that I’ve had UAC turned off<\/a> for a long time now. I never had any trouble with malware in XP, and the UAC was actually preventing me from running a lot of my software, besides being very annoying. According to this page<\/a>, it’s important that if you turn UAC off, you do it before installing the game. If you’re installing the game, you might also find this tweak guide<\/a> useful.<\/p>\n

2-<\/strong> After installing, I downloaded and ran the Thief Deadly Shadows v1.1 patch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

3-<\/strong> I don’t think that this is any part of the fix, but I downloaded and installed John P.’s Thief Deadly Shadows texture pack<\/a>.<\/p>\n

4-<\/strong> I downloaded and implemented the no CD patch<\/a>. I don’t feel guilty about it, since I legally purchased the game and I’m just trying to get it to work.<\/p>\n

5-<\/strong> I right-clicked t3.exe, visited the compatibility tab, and set it to XP(SP2) compatibility mode. This was actually one of the first things I tried, but by itself it didn’t fix my problem. In the end, this step didn’t even matter for me, since I used the no cd exe rather than this one, and I haven’t set any compatibility on the no-cd exe.<\/p>\n

6-<\/strong> Here’s one I put off until the end because I was hoping not to have to do it. I disabled DEP. Following the instructions in this forum thread<\/a>, I went to a command prompt, typed bcdedit.exe \/set {current} nx AlwaysOff<\/strong>, and rebooted.<\/p>\n

7-<\/strong> Lastly, when I actually run the game, I right click the no cd exe and pick “run as administrator”. Yeah, it’s a pain to do it this way, but the game runs. I should re-emphasize that I don’t have compatibility set for this exe, not that I’m sure whether that matters.<\/p>\n

Here’s the other quirky thing. During every loading screen, this error pops up.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Every time a loading screen pops up, the machine goes back to the desktop and I see the error again. When this happens, don’t go within five feet of the mouse or keyboard. Just step away. The game will continue. The one time I clicked OK on the message, the game crashed. If you don’t touch anything, the game should continue normally.<\/p>\n

Hopefully, this article helps someone else get the game running on Vista. It’s a heck of a pain, but Thief: Deadly Shadows is a great game, so it’s worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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