- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
For a very long time, I was getting a crash error in Halo. The game would start fine, but as I played it for a few minutes, the graphics would get steadily more corrupted. First, objects such as character's heads would disappear. Then random 3D shapes would start to appear on the screen, and finally it would go to a blue screen of death, with the message STOP 0x0000001E KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED, a bunch of memory addresses, and the module name "nv4_disp.dll". It would happen no matter which Nvidia drivers I'd installed, I tried several of them that had been released over the past year.
Last night, after a lot of trial-and-error, I discovered the cause. The game is installed on Windows 2000 Server, and I had the Terminal Services feature of 2000 Server installed. In order for the game to work, I had to deinstall Terminal Services (Found in the Add/Remove Windows Components screen). The game now works perfectly.
I'm posting this here for posterity, because I wasn't able to find a solution in my web searches. I hope this will help someone else having the same problem.
Interestingly, Far Cry also has the same problem, although it manifests itself slightly differently. But the solution is the same: Deinstall Terminal Services. Other recent 3D games such as Doom 3 and Painkiller don't have this problem at all, and will run fine with Terminal Services installed.