something has changed in the past couple updates (and a windows update)

when i try to launch the game, some strange secondary process is launched (rundll32) instead of vendetta and it basically eats up most of my cpu time. i have to then launch the game a second time while the process is running, then the game starts and i can kill it.

this operating system is a standard image i use/restore, nothing exciting or interesting about it, no kind of security of any type engaged that might interfere with vendettas process and it effectively doesnt change.

windows 7 pro,
Intel XEON 8 core,
8gb ram,
GTX 570

ps. the last update broke various scripts as well.

yea i checked my system out, looks good.. ill back up my data and reinstall it to see what happens. no the updater doesnt run the first time.

This exact same thing is happening to me since last update

yes I am on win 7
intel i5 2400
8gb ram

yea im running it on various systems depending which room i happen to be in, win10, linux, win7, etc and im golden everywhere but win7 pro. reinstallation and vanilla clients didnt help me personally.

im happy to just kill the process and carry on, its of little consequence but i thought id mention it.

That's super strange. We'll try an test it on Windows 7 before the next release.

Have there been any Windows 7 updates in the same timeframe, when you started experiencing this? It's possible they've added something that interferes with self-updating software.

there were system patches released around 18th/19th of this month

Yeah, I'm concerned this is some kind of anti-malware "feature", because of how the game launcher works.

We targeted looking at this for Friday, but last I saw, my install of the latest Windows 7 image was only half way through installing 174 patches, after 6 hours or something. So, we'll take a look at it next week.

Okay, so, I built a Windows 7 VM, and after a bunch of testing.. this entire issue appears to be due to the Windows 7 "Game Explorer" feature.

To put it simply, Game Explorer decides that it really wants to check for the latest Vendetta Online box-art, for the little "list of games" that it maintains for you, whether you want it or not. And apparently, getting that box-art from Microsoft is no longer working.

Based on this thread on GOG, apparently Microsoft has very-recently decided to shut down games.metaservices.microsoft.com, which is where all that nifty box-art imagery was located. This is part of them approaching the "end-of-life" for Windows 7.

And, what with Game Explorer, being a uhh.. quality product, apparently the program's reaction to a site outage is for gameux.dll to "block forever", and never let the game actually run. Great feature, guys. Anyway..

Here's a Microsoft Technet thread from 2009-2017, discussing the problem and various solutions.

There are a bunch of posted options towards the bottom of the Technet thread, and the GOG thread. I did not have any luck with just disabling the data analytics stuff from within Game Explorer.

The simplest work-around that I found was just to:

- Right-click on the Vendetta Online icon (on the desktop, in this case), and click on Open File Location.
- Single-click on "Vendetta" and rename it to "not.Vendetta" (assuming you aren't showing file extensions).
- It will request Administrator status to let you rename the game executable.
- This removes it from the detection criteria of gameux.

From then on the game should continue working, at least until the next time the game launcher is updated or the game re-installed.

hehe, quality product..

awesome, renamed to fundetta and were golden again. thank you very much. (i skipped around a few sites and most of the other 'solutions' are ridiculous and not functional)

lol

/me renames his desktop icon to "Fundetta"