Right then....
I've been battling this issue since purchasing Arma II nearly 10 days ago, and I've done some pretty in-depth research, but I'm pretty sure that I've fixed the problem. Last night I managed to play for over five hours without a single crash.
My issue appeared to be three fold. I was suffering unhandled exception errors, BSoD's or even complete machine shutdowns at random intervals after between 5-10 minutes of play. In the case of the BSoD's and Exception errors, the culprit appeared to be the NV4_DISP.DLL file.
Some days of research later, it became apparent that NV4_DISP.DLL is notorious on nVidia graphics cards for getting caught in infinite loops that in turn cause the SPECIFIC BSoD I was seeing.
A quick search for a fix turned this up:
http://www.synapse.gr/downloads/nv4loopfix.zip
CLARIFICATION: This fix is only intended to function with nVidia 8x and 9x graphic cards. It will have no impact on ATI kit.
And it worked! No more exceptions or bsod's! woot!
However, I was still getting the complete PC shutdown. Two days later I realised I was using a NoCD patch (over v1.03) and that the DRM software BIS use causes a 'degrade' in the game that can indeed lead to a complete shutdown of an unstable OS.
So, simply removing the NoCD and putting the original .exe back in place solved that issue too.
Believe me, folks, I went through sooooo many fixes before reaching this one that I was getting to the point of giving up. Try it, let me know if it works for you.
TECHNICAL INFO:
So what does it do? It closes the RX55 memory register in BIOS. The RX55 register's official name and function is Memory Write Queue (MWQ) timer. The MWQ timer is actually a timing device included in the memory host controller to prevent write data being held in the memory queue too long. After the data has been in the queue too long it times out. This timed out data is then given a higher write request priority. Now that might sound nice � a bit of extra performance BUT the procedure fails when overloaded. 3D games and Win XP put too much load on the memory queuing timer procedure. The nVidia new driver exaggerates the problem even more as the driver enables nVidia cards to use even more memory than previous driver versions.
So in a nutshell it�s a memory timing problem that only happens when the RX55 register is opened. Some motherboard manufacturers have already released new BIOS that have the register closed. In other instances, this patch is needed.
