Unavoidable client crash at character selection screen

Support Technical Support
1

Have already opened a support ticket, been given the boilerplate crash response template, then had my ticket closed without my agreement and was told to make a forum thread.

The crash always occurs on the character selection screen when the game client tries to load the character models. The game launches, I can log on, I can connect to a realm, I can see my character list, but when the character models are supposed to load is when the crash occurs.

ACCESS_VIOLATION - The instruction at “0x00007ff79cad3e1e” referenced memory at “0xffffffffffffffff”. The memory could not be read.

This is a freshly installed WoW retail installation without any addons.

WoW classic runs without issue.

I’ve tried:

Runnning Wow.exe as administrator
Running in DX11 and DX11 legacy mode
Running in compatibility mode Win7 and Win8
Repairing the game files
Setting the graphics level to 1 before logging in.
Disabling advanced graphical features.
Running in windowed mode via -windowed.
Ensuring Windows 10 and nvidia drivers are up to date
Ensure there are no overlay applications running (no discord, screen recorders, etc)
no overheating is occurring

I am out of ideas and official support refuses to actually look at the crashdump file(s) and tell me why the WoW client does not agree with my system.

I can upload dxdiag, msinfo, the dump itself, images, etc. (What is the preferred method on the forums? pastebin? pasteboard?)

2

Pastebin for a dxdiag please.

3

Thanks for the reply Northernlite.

dxdiag is at ASVdiz6z

4

Which drive is WoW on?

5

Hi Elocin,

I only have 1 drive in my system; a 1TB nvme SSD.

I’ve tried with WoW retail installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft as well as C:\Users\Jennifer\AppData\Local\wowretail (just an experiment to avoid system folders).

Both install locations resulted in the same crash at the same place on the character screen.

Both times I uninstalled and reinstalled completely from the battle.net launcher (not just copy pastes of the game files).

6

Unfortunately, the Dxdiag doesn’t give a direct answer to the crash—it didn’t even record one.

Try collecting the MSInfo instead.

7

I triggered another crash:
269B732C-B559-41AA-9070-AF832E267370

And collected msinfo32

It was too large for a single pastebin file:
part1 k80prmsg
part2 PRR2X7iX

Interestingly, this time my Shaman character model was able to load, but a crash occurred as soon as I clicked on my Monk.

I’ve uploaded a screenshot to pasteboard as well: YHqtBoFhfVtA.png

Thank you for looking into this further.

EDIT to add (since I can’t add another standalone post):

UPDATE 1:
Sometimes (very rarely) the crash does not happen immediately and my Shaman’s model loads.

If I don’t click on my Monk, and instead click on the Change realm button and go to another realm on which I have characters. I can browse those characters without any issue. If I then go back to my main realm (Proudmoore) the client may or may not crash.

If I click on my Monk on Proudmoore it seems to always crash 100% of the time .

Note that I also seem to be missing a character. I’m missing a Death Knight and to be honest I can’t remember which realm I left her on; she seems to have disappeared completely.

I am wondering at this point if perhaps there is something wrong with my account/characters in general; it has been ~11 years since I’ve played retail WoW and I know there have been massive changes since then.

UPDATE 2 after further experimentation:

The crash is sometimes avoidable when I “reset in-game options”, or waiting 10-20 minutes after a previous crash. (Not exactly sure at the moment.)

(I will still encounter the crash if I click on my Monk on Proudmoore)

Another weird thing I noticed is that when I click “Change Realm” not all the realms which contain characters appeared at the top of the list at first.

For example: I know that I had characters on Crushridge but Crushridge was not being sorted to the top of the list and when I manually looked for Crushridge it was listed as having no existing characters for me.
I knew this was not true and double-clicked Crushridge to open this realm and behold I see my 6 toons on Crushridge. Now when I click “Change Realm” Crushridge is sorted at the top of the realm list showing I have 6 characters on this realm.

I am really starting to think my missing Death Knight is the culprit here as the game client:

  1. Was not able to retrieve my character counts in the “Change Realm” dialog, and
  2. My death knight was created before my monk, and trying to select my monk leads to a crash every single time.

Whatever the issue is, it seems to be isolated to me browsing my characters on the Proudmoore server.

8

Nothing direct in that file either. Perform a selective startup. Stop things like Oculus server etc from running.

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