On-Screen display causing *some* Steam games to crash

[Calypsochimera]

Long time lurker, first time poster. This forum has provided me with countless amounts of useful information and I appreciate you guys taking the time to help out!

I've searched around and was unable to find anyone else with the same issue so I apologize in advance if this has already been covered.

When launching some games from Steam, the game immediately crashes without opening the title screen and Windows gives the "XXXX has stopped working, Windows is checking for a solution to the problem..." I've discovered that disabling the on screen display fixes this issue, but obviously this isn't the preferred fix. The only games this happens with are TF2 and Skyrim, however many other steam games work fine with OSD enabled.

The problem appears to be with RTSS (MSI On-Screen Display Server) and not MSI Afterburner itself. I've concluded this from the fact that MSI Afterburner's fan profiles, overclocking settings, etc., continue to work just fine in Skyrim and TF2 after I've disabled OSD.

Enabling logging history in the monitoring tab of the MSI AB gui seems to only capture information about the GPU's performance, not about the program itself. I didn't see any logging options for the RTSS piece of the program specifically.

I swapped out my 570 GTX with my old 285 GTX and the issue still persists. In addition to this, a friend of mine has an identical rig to mine hardware-wise and is able to leave the OSD enabled while in Skyrim, as I'm sure many of you are.

I'm currently running version 2.2.0 Beta 8 but I get the same problem with 2.1.0. Thank you in advance for any suggestions and let me know if any additional information about my system and/or settings would help.

RTSS Current Settings:

Application detection level: Low (I've tried all levels)
Stealth mode: On (tried off)
OSD Support (On)
OSD rendering mode - Vector 3D

[boogieman]

Originally Posted by Calypsochimera

In addition to this, a friend of mine has an identical rig to mine hardware-wise and is able to leave the OSD enabled while in Skyrim, as I'm sure many of you are.

Sounds like it's not an AB issue and I doubt Alex can troubleshoot your PC from Russia.

[Calypsochimera]

Originally Posted by boogieman

Sounds like it's not an AB issue and I doubt Alex can troubleshoot your PC from Russia.

Thanks for your reply but I don't really understand your reasoning. Being able to confirm that OSD works on identical hardware would indicate that it is, in fact, an issue with Afterburner. Disabling the OSD eliminates the problem...further indicating that Afterburner is causing a conflict with these games.

[Unwinder]

Upgrade DX runtimes to the latest version and add those games to OSD server's exceptions list if you're using them with any additional third party OSD software.

[diegobah]

I have recently run into the EXACT same issue as the OP.

Everything was fine with my MSI afterburner and On-Screen Display Server. It was working with all games on my system.

I hadn't run a windows update for a while on my win 7 64bit os install and then immediately after doing so my On-Screen Display Server started to cause the same errors as listed by the op.

All of my games now fail to load until I turn off Afterburner. I know this was caused by a windows update on my system I just don't know which update.

[diegobah]

I went through the uninstall for Win 7 SERVICE PACK 1 (KB976932) and my on-screen display seems to be working again. Looks like sp1 was the issue for me at this point.

It seemed the most likely culprit out of the 50 or so updates that were installed at the same time.