Hi This is my first post to these forums, so at first, Hello to everybody. An then to the actual problem. Running AoE3 causes my system to hardlock after a random amount of time. No BSODs appear, no system restarts as well. All I can find later on is a System Event that says: The COM+ Event System detected a bad return code during its internal processing. HRESULT was C0000005 from line 44 of d:\qxp_slp\com\com1x\src\event s\tier1\eventsystemobj.cpp. Please contact Microsoft Product Support Services to report this error. I've tried several nvidia drivers, no difference there. My system is up to date. Temperatures are OK. What is causing the hardlocking? My system is as follows: AMD Athlon XP 2600+ Barton 2 x 512Mb DDR 333MHz (Kingston) Club3D GeForce 6600GT Asrock K7S8XE R3.0 mobo Windows XP Pro SP2 Fortron 400W PSU