PunkBuster causing registry to become corrupted.

[FusionGtX]

I have had this issue before back when i bought BF2 and tried to play it online, but didnt really think much of it since i didnt play it much anyways.

However i got COD4:MW last week (from Steam), and after finishing the first player campaign i decided to play it online. As expected, i was asked to install PunkBuster which i did and it updated itself and everything. After playing the game for few hours i turned off the computer. The next morning when i turned on the computer, it didnt even go till the (blue) Welcome screen. All i see is the first Microsoft Windows screen and right after that the screen goes black and stays that way.

Now i know for sure its PunkBuster, because the samething happened to me when i tried to play BF2 online and after that incident i have been making a backup of my system every week. So after this current failure i restored my PC back to the state it was last week and installed PB again and long behold samething happened. The system didnt boot the next time. I haven tried this about 10+ times removing several of the softwares on my PC each time (even removed my AV software which was Symantec Antivirus Enterprise Edition) and samething the system wouldnt boot the next time.

I have the latest Drivers for my Sound Card and Video Card ( and my Specs are the following:

OS Windows XP SP2
AMD 4000+ (single core)
2 GB Ram
eVGA 7800GT
WD 250 GB 6MB Cache HD (this is where the XP is installed)
Seagate 320 16MB Cache HD (for the games and my media stored)

I even tried to play the game on Vista Business (which was installed on the second HD and was rarely used) , and samething happened the windows didnt boot the next time. (only tried it once)

I really dont even know whats wrong or why is it happening. I have googled this and nothing close came up. I dont know what to do. Any suggestions what could be causing this?.

Any help/comments would be appreciated.

[imported_Tren]

Wow...

Well as stunned as I am to hear about this issue, I would normally say that it is not punkbuster, but it seems like you have tested so much that PB is the only variable causing the problem.

In that case I would submit a ticket to PunkBuster support because I have no idea how to help ya.
>>>PB Web Ticket System, Game:COD4

[Vreki]

I think it sounds very strange that you encounter a unique PB problem on two different OS on different drives.
A hardware failure or PB hating virus seems much more likely, but of course you cant rule anything out.

I have some question about the details of your testing:

A) You say that you tried to uninstall several programs. Does that mean that you:

1. Recovered from the backup
2. Verified that it could boot
3. Uninstalled the program
4. Verified that it could boot
5. Installed COD4 with PB
6. Had a boot failure

B) Have you tried using a significantly older backup?

C) Have you tried disabling the punkbuster service so it doesn't start up at boot?

D) Have you tried recovering just the registry instead of the whole backup.

E) Have you tried installing another new program that runs like an admin service. e.g. another virusscanner?

F) Does this happen regardless of how long the computer has been on, or only when you have been playing for a while?

[FusionGtX]

Suspecting it was a hardware failure i ran memtest86+ a little while ago and it found nothing. So i removed all the PCI cards that were installed, restored to a backup and tried PunkBuster and not only it worked perfectly but it didnt corrupt anything.

I also installed all the cards one by one back and it appears that it was Iogear GIC251U - USB 2.0 PCI Card that was causing the problem. So now i have removed it and out of frustration broke it into two pieces =/ .

Thanks Vreki for the hint, i suspected it to be a hardware failure myself but didn't think much of it till you said it.