Recently I purchased Battlefield 2142. At first the game appeared to run alright, but as soon as the game has finished loading and the game play begins the game ends. There is no error message and no functionality problems – the game simply ends and exits back to the Windows desktop. No other games have had this problem on the computer, so I am unsure as to the cause of this problem. Is this fixable?

This is certainly a frustrating problem, as there is no discernable reason provided as to why the game just stops. The problem is unlikely to be due to a faulty game CD or DVD as it gets through all the game loading steps, but exists when the game play begins. This indicates that there is something going awry when your computer attempts to play the game. As a first step, make sure you have downloaded all the latest updates for the game from battlefield.ea.com/battlefield/bf2142/ . This will rule out the problem being caused by a known issue or conflict with the game. Another possible cause of the problem is a conflict between a hardware device on your computer and the game. The most likely suspects for such a conflict are the graphics (video) card and sound card. Therefore, as the next step in our investigation into the problem I suggest you download and install the latest drivers for your graphics card and sound card.

One more possible cause is that DirectX on your computer is out of date. This is used to draw 3D graphics on the computer, and if this has become out of date it could explain why the game closes when the game play (i.e. 3D graphics) commence. Download and install the latest version of DirectX from www.microsoft.com/downloads (which was version 9.24.1400 at the time of writing). You will need to search the download database for “DirectX” and this should be the first result that appears.

If you continue to have difficulty, it is possible that some program running in the background is conflicting with Battlefield. Reading various forum posts from people experiencing a similar problem indicate that certain background applications can interfere with Battlefield and cause this problem. To resolve this issue, try closing all background applications and processes. Close any visible programs running on your computer (including those in the system tray, next to the clock). Once this has been done, we need to close the invisible processes running in the background. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to open the Task Manager. Click the “Processes” tab and click the “User Name” column heading to sort the processes by user name (if this column is not visible, go to the “View” menu > “Select Columns” and tick “User Name”). Close all processes running under your user name except “explorer.exe” (the Windows graphical user interface) and “taskmgr.exe” (the Task Manager, which you are using to close the other processes). Only close processes running under your user name, do not touch processes running under other users (as these are likely to be system processes). Once this has been done, check whether Battlefield will load. If so, one of those processes is the problem. You will likely want to track down which process is causing the problem. Restart the computer (so that all the processes reload) and then close the processes one-by-one, each time checking whether the problem has been fixed. This should allow you to eventually track down the particular process causing the problem.