Update 35: crash after starting the game (&fix)

Ghulfield · August 2022

Update 35 had the immediate effect of breaking the game for me - on two different (!) Windows machines the game kept crashing every time immediately after clicking on "start" in the launcher.

I was able to fix this by renaming the UserSettings.txt (which resides in Documents/Eleder Scrolls Online/live or deep in some Steam folder) to UserSettings.txt.bak

This causes the game to create a fresh settings file. Probably it is enough to change a particular setting, but since there are a lot of settings I didn´t feel like experimenting.

Just in case someone has the same problem.

Troodon80 · August 2022

I don't suppose you could do a comparison on the two files to see what has changed and narrow down the cause from there?

Ghulfield · August 2022

Troodon80 wrote: »

I don't suppose you could do a comparison on the two files to see what has changed and narrow down the cause from there?

Well, since I changed several settings using the UI over the years I played the game a simple diff will show a lot of changes that have nothing to do with the problem.
But, yes, I can still do a comparison later and see if I can narrow it down.

Ghulfield · August 2022

The offending entry was:

SET ACTIVE_DISPLAY "1"

I had to change it back to

SET ACTIVE_DISPLAY "0"

It´s a notebook, and I had last (and in fact nearly exclusively) used it with the internal display (which I guess is "0"), but this doesn´t seem to be stored in the config file properly. In addition, the old program version seems to have handled the entry more gracefully.

Troodon80 · August 2022

Really good work on narrowing it down. Hopefully it helps someone else if they encounter a similar issue.

Maybe someone at ZOS can look at this as well.

Ghulfield · August 2022

@ZOS : have a look, maybe you can make your software more forgiving again
@ZOS : probably this thread should be moved to technical support / PC

JustSaiyan360 · August 2022

Glad I'm not the only one with this issue.. I been trying anything and everything to fix it.. Hopefully this will be the fix for me as well.. its been days!! thanks for the post!

Tundra_Shark · September 2022

Troodon80 wrote: »

Really good work on narrowing it down. Hopefully it helps someone else if they encounter a similar issue.

This fix worked for me. It looks like I had the bad luck of finally hooking up a second monitor the same day that I downloaded the patch. I immediately crashed every time, and none of the conventional fixes did anything. Even a fresh re-install didn't work. Per this thread though, changing the 'SET ACTIVE_DISPLAY' to '0' immediately worked.