Windows updated, games crash on launch
 

Updates KB5021233 and KB5021089 installed today and now the DFX2 based mods I have and the DFX1 demo crash on start. Comanche 4 and DFBHD(TS) are okay. None of the misson editors I tested seem troubled. I tried some compatability settings, and moving the game.cfg and .sav files out of the folder, but no joy.

Any guidance?

If you read about those two updates they would seem completely unrelated to the game being broken. DF2 does not depend on .NET and its not a camera.

My instinct was to just roll back the update, and when I opened that dialog, KB5021233 is labeled a security update, and I immediately imagined it tweaks permissions or compatabilities, and...

I'm just so tired. I was hoping a simple answer would just drop in my thread, you know?

I'm loath to uninstall a security update.

But I did. See, I have the Battlefield 2 demo installed and modified in ways I enjoy, and when that wouldn't start, I was like, "Yeah, I don't think so."

I uninstalled those two updates. The games start now. I've paused the updates for 35 days, and I'll hope for the best.

'Cause something like this has happened before. Update breaks a game, I roll it back, the update gets installed later, and it doesn't break the game the second time. My paranoid nightmare goes like this: the malware recognizes the new Windows update, bricks my games expecting me to roll the updates back, alerts the hacker about the situation, the hacker updates his malware to deal with the new Windows update, then when the Windows update reinstalls, all goes well.

It can't really be that pernicious, can it?

I just run linux with wine and most of my games work but some patch to the kernel a long time ago broke my ability to play novalogic games online since the ibrowser dll or games that have it statically linked have threading problems and wait like milliseconds instead of seconds for the page to load.

More likely, when it happened that way previously, a subsequent update on top of the broken one fixed a regression (i.e. bug introduced in the previous update).

Unless you're into some shady stuff Hanlon's razor is invaluable when reasoning about your own little threat model.