Main menu Confetti Death???

[TorQueMoD]

Hey all!

So I installed my copy of Gears about a week or two ago, played with my friend and everything was fine. Now that we want to play again, I loaded the game and was presented with a menu screen that looks like it was sprayed with confetti, I can't see anything and the buttons don't work.

http://www.torquemod.com/gearsWTF.jpg

I have the latest patch installed (TU#3) and the latest version of GFWL.

The first time this happened, I Alt+Tabed the game and end tasked it and decided to load the game again. This time, it hard froze my computer and I had to press the reset button to get my computer back.

At this point I decided to un-install and re-install.

After a VERY long install (longer than usual for some reason) I loaded up the game again and it worked fine. The only problem was that my save games were gone and my buddy and I didn't want to have to play from the start again, so I exited the game, copied chapter8.sav and renamed it to chapter0.sav and loaded the game again only to be greeted by the Confetti Death again.

No matter what I do, I can't seem to get the game to run more than once before I get this menu glitch.

Anyone have any ideas what's up?

All my other games work, including Unreal Engine games. I have the latest Video Drivers and anything else that would be needed to make the game run. This is the weirdest thing I've ever seen!

My system is an Intel Quad Core 3.0ghz QX6850 NOT overclocked
8GB of ram
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260
Windows XP 64bit.
Onboard (Realtek) Audio.

Thanks in advance!

[TorQueMoD]

Ok, so for anyone else who might run into this issue, I found that the problem was with running the game at the highest resolution of 1920x1080. I don't know why this would be an issue, but changing the res to 1680x1050 fixed the problem.
To do this (since I couldn't access the settings screen cause the game crashes on start) I went into MyDocs\My Games\Gears of War for Windows\WarGame\Config and opened the file WarEngineUserSettings.ini
At the bottom is a section that says
[WinDrv.WindowsClient]
StartupResolutionX=1280
StartupResolutionY=1024
StartupFullscreen=True
DisplayGamma=2.000000

There you can change the settings to whatever resolution you like and the game will run fine again.

I'm currently chatting with a dumb as nails MS tech support guy who's 5 steps behind me and can't give me a guess as to why the full res doesn't work.
I'll let you know if I make any progress.

[TorQueMoD]

So like I thought, the tech support at microsoft are retards. They claim that if changing the resolution to 1680x1050 fixes the problem, then there is no glitch at all. Ignorant Facktards!

So if anyone else can give me a clue as to why this might not be working when every other Unreal Engine 3 game runs perfectly at 1920x1080 and technically so does gears, just not the main menu after 1 start... I'll be greatly indebted to you.

[XStalkerxx]

So like I thought, the tech support at microsoft are retards. They claim that if changing the resolution to 1680x1050 fixes the problem, then there is no glitch at all. Ignorant Facktards!

So if anyone else can give me a clue as to why this might not be working when every other Unreal Engine 3 game runs perfectly at 1920x1080 and technically so does gears, just not the main menu after 1 start... I'll be greatly indebted to you.

usually that happens from video card corruption....let it a bit a longer a you will get a message "nvidia video driver GPU stopped working bla bla bla" something like that

it happens to me from time to time on almost every game. (overheating,etc) and of course if you go for the highest resolution thats an instant more stress for the components.

i just quickly press ALT+tab,ctrl+alt+delete or ctrl+escape. then i alt-tab again and that corrupted screen goes away

[TorQueMoD]

Normally I would have thought this as well, but the problem was only occuring with Gears specifically. Unreal 3 and Batman Arkum Asylum (Both unreal engine 3 games) work fine without problem at 1920x1080.

I re-installed windows because 3D Studio Max was freezing a lot, and after a fresh install and max was still freezing, I installed the last version of Nvidia drivers I had downloaded and everything is working fine now. So it looks like Nvidia tweaked something that max and gears didn't like?

Either way it works now.

Thanks for the help though.