A fix for Diablo 3, and probably a breakthough workaround for those having similar troubles.

[tom_mai78101]

According to this source here by the lead developer of Paint.NET, he posted a very interesting blogpost with a game fix for some common games.

Anyway, the fix is a bit clumsy but it seems to work (so far! we’ll see if it still works after all the downloading is done):

1. Download the “Diablo-III-Setup-enUS.exe” as usual, from Blizzard’s website.
2. Run it, as usual (double click on it).
3. When you get the UAC prompt, do NOT click Yes (yet).
4. Instead, open up Task Manager and find the program in the “Processes” tab (Diablo-whatever.exe)
5. Right click on it and then click on the “Set Affinity…” command.
6. Make sure only 1 of the CPU’s checkboxes is enabled. If you’re on Windows 7, just click the “<All Processors>” node to uncheck everything, and then click on “CPU 0” to enable it. This will lock the program to just 1 CPU core/thread, minimizing the risk of the hypothesized multithreading bug.
7. Now you can click on Yes in the UAC prompt… and tada, it should work.

I found some battle.net forum threads where tons of people are having this issue, and it goes on and on for pages and pages without any fix for the poor souls (so to speak).
Once it starts downloading you’ll probably want to do the same thing for “Blizzard Launcher.exe” except that this time you’ll 1) have to click the “Show processes from all users” button (bottom of Task Manager in the Processes tab), and then 2) enable all CPUs instead of having any of them disabled.

Hope this helps anyone else who’s having this frustrating problem.

Update: Once Diablo 3 finished downloading, it still would not start after clicking the Play button. “Diablo III.exe” would pop up in Task Manager, and then silently disappear a few seconds later. According to the Windows Event Viewer, it was crashing. However, I did get it to work, and the trick is to “Set Affinity” on explorer.exe and give it something like 4 of the CPU cores. Since processor affinity is inherited, running Diablo 3 from within Windows Explorer (aka your desktop) now works. Hey Blizzard! Try testing on something more than a dual core Pentium D!

Apparently, this is news for me. There are some old Chinese games that I can't seem to play on my workstation, and they sometimes crash upon startup. I tried this method on 3 random games, and they work fine up to the point of quitting the game immediately.

They all suck, by the way.

The trick is what the developer posted, and that is to use the "Set Affinity..." method. Try it out on some of your games and see if this method works for you. I would like to remind you that this may or may not work for all of us.