I think i have the same problem with XP, took off autosaving and the game quits/crashes when trying to logout from the Onlink user, therefore not saving my progress. Upgraded to Windows 7 and still have the same problem

Worth noting that im not that far into the game, same as Hans, Proxy disabler v.5, 1st Gateway etc.

You "upgraded" to Windows 7. As in, via the installer 'Upgrade' option, or reformatted and installed Windows 7? If the former, that's interesting news, because that means that Windows 7 isn't distributed with whatever is causing the problem, but it doesn't eliminate it on an upgrade, either.

Sorry yeah bad phrasing, i installed Windows 7 from scratch. Just spent an hour on Onlink, and has happened again ....seems like it hangs for a few minutes then it states Run Time error before telling me Onlink will now close.

Not sure if the following may be partly correlated in any way:

-'Connecting to the gateway' at the beginning can take a few minutes.
-Fast forwarding the game sometimes brings this message (also happened in XP):

'Onlink has recovered from a serious error. Please zip and send your player profile to forensics@onlink-mod.net. Your player profile is still stable and you may resume play.'

It'd also be helpful to see the specs of the machines encountering the issue (especially pertaining to the processor). I suspect it could be a scheduling issue, which would actually be pretty easy to fix.

short,
Intel Core Duo, 1,66 GHz, SSE3
1 GB physical memory (interesting enough, onlink uses over 500 MB ram while loading, using the pagefile allot even when more physical memory available, and disabling the pagefile=onlink crash on load..)

Dual core 2500 running windows 7, and i have no problems

I really need a multi-factored poll for this. I need a poll that covers this:

1. Are you experiencing the load/save duration issue?
2. What operating system are you currently running? Did you use the "upgrade" install option to upgrade from a previous version? If yes, what OS did you run previously?
3. What processor do you have? Single core? Dual core? Hyperthreaded?

It'd be great to get a graphical representation of this. Anyone want to set up a poll for this, somehow, somewhere?

I'd really like to get this load/save issue resolved before we really get Cerberus going.

http://www.polldaddy.com/ ?

I believe XP doesn't maintain any kind of buffer for file writing operations, which means that each fwrite() will be a system call, so I would advise keeping a buffer in memory and then writing save files in one shot.

1) Yes. But only save seems to take quite a long time
2) XP home. "Upgraded" from 98 SE.
3) Core 2 DUO E8400 (3GHZ)

Hope it helps.

How did you have 98 running on a 3ghz core 2 duo????

I never did. I've just used my windows 98 SE and windows XP "Upgrade" disk ever since.

Ohhh that makes more sense. I thought that computer came with windows 98.

We do that already.

And Windows XP does buffer file operations, like any other sane operating system.

You say that as if you thought XP was sane.