Games For Windows Live Stuck On “Signing In”?

Recently I was having trouble getting any GFWL game to work. The store client itself was always fine, but every game was unusable. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the latest client, and even installing an older one from the redist folder of Blacklight Tango Down. I know UPnP works on my router and this computer, so how can that be it, right?

I found this post that mentions resetting the TCP stack and Winsock. This method seems to be mentioned occasionally, but much less than the usual reset router, restart this, reinstall that.

So what you do is open a command prompt (as Administrator if needed), type ‘netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt‘ and the status of each item should say ‘OK’. That user post says to type in the winsock reset command, but I couldn’t do anything further in that window once it completed, so I opened up a second one and typed ‘netsh winsock reset‘.

Now I had 2 cmd windows open, they wouldn’t close, the restart button in the start menu didn’t work, and well, I hit the reset button on my case. Seemed a little sloppy, but my GFWL games are now loading fine! Don’t disable the Windows Live ID Sign-In Assistant service, it appears to be needed.

ATI Catalyst 10.8b Hotfix

I HEARD YOU LIKE UPDATES: 10.10 works perfect, I tested every one of the stuck games, and a couple of the regular.

UPDATE2: Get the 10.9 hotfix, so you can have any other fixes that are in 10.9 itself. This list here still applies, since both 10.9 and the HF were made before I even started this list. Hopefully they figure it out for 10.10.

UPDATE: They’re looking into it. (Cool! Terry saw me.)

Time for some testing. This is for those that had the 2nd crossfire gpu stay in 2d speeds.

Download 10.8b hotfix from AMD. (Older, if you don’t like 10.9 for whatever reason.)

I’ll update this as I go. You can open and close one of the ‘ok’ games to get the core back into 2d no problem.

ATI Catalyst 10.7 Major Crossfire Issue

UPDATE: 10.10 Solves it for good.

NEW HOTFIX DRIVER: 10.8b says it fixed the issue, which might have appeared on 10.6. It’s almost perfect, the games are ok, but when exiting some of them, the core is still in 3d speeds. Here’s a list of some games that I tested. I was close to trying TwL‘s drivers, too…

Today I installed Catalyst 10.7 drivers after skipping 10.6 from hearing some horror stories. I’m with a 4870×2 using Vista64. The installation went smoothly, including the HDMI install. (A year ago the HDMI installer failed on one release, worked on the next month’s release.)

After some testing, there’s a severe problem with the 2d/3d detection, so far with the second core.

With DX9 and OGL games, the second core does not switch between 2d and 3d speeds. On a fresh boot, it stays idle after launching a game. This mismatch makes games really stuttery, especially if they are more demanding. The DX9 games I tested were: Borderlands, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Far Cry 2, Lead and Gold, Mirror’s Edge, Moonbase Alpha, Need for Speed SHIFT, Serious Sam HD.

Mirror’s Edge managed to flip the second core into 3d, but then it got stuck after exiting! I checked Borderlands and it was as smooth as it was before (some areas can dip to ~45fps). Lead and Gold finally has a crossfire profile in the drivers, so now that the second core was in 3d mode, the game was nice and smooth without the huge flicker and ~40fps from before.

DirectX 10/11 games I tested (Battlefield Bad Company 2, Red Faction Guerrilla, Shattered Horizon) work just fine. Launching and exiting flips both cores correctly into 2d/3d. Even after Mirror’s Edge locks the second core into 3D, you could reset it back to idle speed by opening and closing a DX10 game.

If there is no hotfix, it might still be possible to take a specific .dll from 10.5 or 10.6 and put it in the Windows system folder so you can still use the new game profiles of 10.7.

Disable WordPress’s Visual Editor On Specific Posts

Simple and quick tip for WordPress. You might run into this if you have code snippets or other things in the HTML view that get malformed once you enter the visual view of the editor.

This WP plugin covers the basic functionality. The minor issue is that you have to open the post’s edit view to input the custom field, instead of having a button in the list of posts section of the admin area. Maybe there is a plugin for editing custom fields ajax-style, or a richer version of this visual/html toggle that I may have missed.

Disable Auto-Eject On Empty Drives

Have you tried to double click on a hard drive in MyComputer, only to accidentally click your optical drive and have it eject? This gets annoying if you’re trying to be quiet at night, or if you have one of those cases with a door that covers up the drive bays. Luckily it’s a simple fix, but you won’t be able to use the built in Windows burning functionality. You should be able to still use third-party burning tools like ImgBurn just fine. (In fact I need my options and project files, so I’m never using built in OS stuff anyway)

In the registry, go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Add a DWORD called NoCDBurning and set it to 1.

That’s it. Log off and on again to make it work. This might be just a Vista and 7 feature, but try it on XP if it ejects as well.

Disable Network Thumbs.db Generation

When I got Vista, I noticed something ‘annoying’ when I was browsing some folders over the network/lan. A thumbs.db file was generated into any folder that included images inside, either from hovering over one with the mouse, or browsing it. This totally messes up your folder list if you need to arrange by the modified date instead of by name, and your folders are weeks/months/years old. This will be a ‘brute force’ method, blocking both network and local thumbs.db generation, without gpedit.msc or any reg keys. Windows 7 probably might work too.

Go here: C:\Users\YOURNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows (you can also paste %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows into your explorer address bar)

Go to Organize>Folder and Search Options>View (or Tools>Folder Options>View in the address bar, push Alt if your address bar is hidden)

(If you are hiding any files, enable the ‘Show hidden files and folders‘ option AND turn OFF ‘Hide protected operating system files‘.)

Enable ‘Always show icons, never thumbnails‘ for now. This will be so you can delete the existing local thumbs.db files. Go into the Explorer folder (so you’re in ‘…\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer‘). Delete everything in here, which should be a bunch of thumbs.db files pertaining to different pixel sizes.

Open the Properties of this Explorer folder and go to Security>Advanced>Permissions>Edit. Turn off ‘Include inheritable permissions from this object’s parent‘, then ‘Remove‘ on the dialogue that comes up. It should say that there are no groups or users with access to this object. Hit Apply/OK and keep OK’ing till you’re done with the properties of the Explorer folder.

Now you can re-enable your thumbnails by unticking ‘Always show icons, never thumbnails’ and go back to your preferred hidden files options as well.

That’s it. Thumbs.db is permanently blocked from being generated anywhere. The OS is blocked from generating them on each folder of a network share that you’re browsing, and also from taking up local space. According to a reply in this thread, they had some ‘save/save as’ issues in Word 2003, but I’m not seeing any issue on Word 2007 or any other application. If you have an issue, post a comment here, and we could probably adjust the permissions to work around that while still blocking thumbs.db generation.