This problem started last night, I think after downloading a new patch through DAOC Portal

Every time I try to alt tab the screen freezes but sound continues to come through, I could hear my group fighting mobs. Earlier today I tried running in windowed mode and I still had the same issue, except the screen did not freeze but still refused to minimize.

It doesn't sound like a major problem because the game still functions but I'm typically alt tabbing all the time to check character builds, forums, changing songs etc...it really dampens game play when you group for 4 hours and can't alt tab

All drivers are up to date as well

Bumping

Still unable to alt tab, I see a German player has the same issue in their support forums.



Running Windows 8 64bit, tried all compatibility options for both the loader and daoc, all drivers are up to date, no custum UI, this started happening out of no where after a patch last month. It's honestly ruining the game since I'm unable to do anything else on the computer while daoc is running. Just to reiterate it goes something like this....

Game starts fine, login to a character, alt tab, screen freezes, sound continues (including new spells I cast via keyboard and players interacting around me), have to restart via hardboot. Tried windowed mode and the same thing happens - it seems like the DAoC screen just does not want to minimize - it will continue to do this even if I run it in a little 800x600 window

it sounds like you're having hardware issues reinitializing the video.

try using windowed mode.

pythion, in his first post he stated that it still occurs in Windowed mode, but either way...

I know you also said that all of your drivers are up to date, but this sounds like a graphics card issue. Maybe try a BETA driver, or a previous driver version, and see if that resolves your issue.

Thanks for your suggestion - had to work and only now got the chance to try different drivers, unfortunately I'm still getting the same problem.

My video card is a GeForce 660 Ti - tried current drivers, beta drivers and past drivers (that I used while alt tabbing successfully in December 2012). I'm wondering if one of the updates in March is incompatible with Windows 8 somehow - anyone else have issues while using Win8?



On top of this alt tab problem I'm now experiencing what others have called "Packet-loss" - lag to DC around 12-5 pm Eastern time NA. This has also only started several weeks ago, never had an issue playing during prime-times in the past year and unfortunately because of this alt-tab thing I can't run a trace program

Just feels like this is getting less and less playable by the week - and it's hard to complain because it's a free game run by great people in their spare time but I have grown quite attached to it and would hate to leave it

Myself and Abydos are North American Game Masters. And we are also at times afflicted with latency issues, due to american time zones and euro timezones. What i'm meaning is euro servers go down for maintenance or limit bandwidth etc so your connection can go from great to horrid sometimes.

Not sure if it would help but had you tried messing with pre rendered frames to 1 and set vsync to adaptive to help with alt tabing. what i had to set my 550 ti 1g to help with that.

I'm sorry to hear that you're still encountering issues, gregmh.

Since you were convinced in your first post that it was Uthgard's latest patch that caused the issue, let's try this...

Uninstall DAoC Portal using Add and Remove programs.
Browse to the installation directory (Default: Program Files\DAoC Portal or Program Files (x86)\DAoC Portal) and simply delete the folder.
Launch the Test client to patch to Live Test.
Download, and install the latest DAoC Portal client from here.
Set up the settings appropriately.
Log in to patch, and get in-game. See if your issue is resolved.

As for your packet-loss issue, perform a simple tracert from CMD, and tell us if it goes through EuroRings. If so, that's the cause, and unfortunately - it seems beyond Uthgard's Staff, and Players ability to resolve. The only fix is to switch ISP (either Uthgard, or the Player), which may not even resolve the issue, as Eurorings handles a majority of the incoming western traffic.