Wtf Epic : (

[gargorias]

The error you linked is very rare and does not fit the actual problem. It does not explain why "corruption" is more common in ut3 than all other applications.
Many applications use ini files and xml to store dynamic data, if this problem is common as you claim you would see other apps losing your settings and failing to start all the time.

Do you have proof that this corruption is more prevalent in UT3 then any other software?

It has happened to me with other games (Crysis was a good one) and many people quite often experience corrupt save game files or the settings will not save problem.

Because this game will load even if there is no or incomplete user ini files then perhaps it is more accentuated here as UTengine.ini holds the user key!

Turn your pc off without proper shutdown, blue screen of death or having software crash or hang while it is in the process of saving or writing data to files can cause these problems particularly if you have write caching or advanced performance turned on for your HDD's.

The fact that many people have experienced this game hang, crash or blue screen is a good pointer to the fact that this is a possible cause for the problem in many instances.

Also remember that UT3 does a lot of writing to log files as well!

I suggest that most people run chckdsk on there drives, you would be surprised at how many crosslinked files you may have.

[bambislayer99]

I got this error when I installed a VMware.

What happened is the network devices go shuffled around and caused UT3 to get bent out of shape.

When I disabled the VMware network devices, UT3 stopped prompting me for my CD key.

I suspect it's got some hard coded network card addressing in it somewhere?