COD Ghosts Multiplayer crashes badly with ESET firewall enabled

[tonteldoos 0]

Hi, after an immense amount of troubleshooting, I have finally isolated the issue of COD Ghosts multiplayer consistently completely crashing every time it starts. It crashes so badly that I have to restart my PC from the ctrl-alt-del screen. The crashing started on 12 Dec after the latest patch was applied on the Steam platform.

 

It appears to be related to my ESET Smart Security firewall. Whenever I disable the firewall completely, the game runs. But it used to work fine before the patch!

 

I have:

• Upgraded to Smart Security 7 (didn't make a difference)
  
• Recreated the firewall rule for iw6mp64_ship.exe (didn't make a differerence)
  
• Tried to run the firewall in automatic, automatic with filtering, interactive and learning modes (didn't make a difference)
  

 

Are other users experiencing the same, and maybe have a solution? I cannot see that it would be a good idea to run the game with firewall disabled!?

 

My system specs are:

Windows 7 64-bit

8Gb RAM

Intel i7-3770 3.4Ghz

Nvidia GTX 760 OC

[SweX 871]

Hello tonteldoos

 

FYI also see this thread started just a few days ago where a very similar problem (maybe even identical) is discussed.

 

If the Eset firewall is running then Ghosts would crash\freeze so badly I would be forced to reboot my machine. The only way to run the game was to do so with the firewall disabled.

 

https://forum.eset.com/topic/1603-call-of-duty-ghosts/

[Marcos 5,070]

Just out of curiosity, does creating bi-directional allowing rules for each of the supported protocols make a difference? Also do the following:

- empty the firewall log

- enable logging of blocked communications in the IDS setup -> Troubleshooting

- reproduce the issue

- post the firewall log records here 

[tonteldoos 0]

Hi Marcos,

 

Thanks for the reply! I'm not sure what you mean by creating bi-directional rules? Do you mean creating 4 rules (i.e. TCP in/out and UDP in/out)? Do these games use any other protocols (perhaps that's a stupid question...)?

 

In terms of logging the issues, I have set any rule related to Steam or Nvidia or any COD game to log its actions. I then ran all three games (MW2, MW3 and Ghosts) in multiplayer mode. This ran from the time of 23:41 until the PC crashed again with Ghosts (the first two ran perfectly). The PC was booted back up by around 23:48. I tried to include the log file, but it's too long to post here, and when I shortened it, it just posted as gibberish... Is there a clever way to share the xls here?

 

It was interesting that the log file showed communication allowed for this file: C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\Update Core\NvBackend.exe (TCP) a couple of seconds after launching Ghosts. Not sure if that plays a role?

Edited December 27, 2013 by tonteldoos

[tonteldoos 0]

I've tried a couple more things:

• Uninstalled Nvidia Geforce Experience (apparently related to the nvbackend file) - No difference
• Reinstalled Nvidia Geforce Experience, but this time opted not to optimise any games' video settings - No difference
• Recreated the firewall rule for Ghosts to have 4 separate rules (TCP and UDP, in and out) - No difference
• Set up a DMZ in my router with my PC's static IP (I use a TP-Link WDR4900) - No difference

This is INFURIATING!!! Seeing as I also have firewall enabled in my router, what are the risks associated with just running the game with the ESET firewall disabled??