Mass Effect (Steam)

[Wrex2150]

Ive owned the 3 Mass Effect games for the 360 since they came out, but it has come time to upgrade to a newer console. Since the Xbox one has no backwards compatibility, I decided to repurchase the series on my pc; so I went and bought me1 on Steam. That was 3 days ago. I haven't been able to play for more than 5 minutes before getting a "General protection fault!". The actual text is-

"Rendering thread exception:

General protection fault!

History: Address = 0x10bb5bf6 (filename not found) [ in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\MassEffect\Binaries\MassEffect.exe]"

I have spent the better part of 2 days reading every thread and forum and trying every solution I could find on the Internet to no avail. Ive tried:

Verifying cache integrity

Deleting local content and redownloading (a few times)

restarting my comp (lots)

deleting BIOEngine.ini

trying every compatibility setting

trying every core affinity 0-8

playing in window mode

hardware sound on and off

lowering graphical settings

made sure all drivers were up to date

rolled back nvidia drivers

rolled back sound drivers

reinstalled physX

game is patched to latest

ran as Admin (along with everything else listed)

My specs:

GPU GeForce GTX 760

CPU AMD FX 8120 Eight Core

16 gigs RAM

1TB hard drive

Operating system Windows 7 home premium

Enough cooling and power

It leaves no .dmp or logs when it crashes. Any help would be appreciated.

[-MG-Philsco]

When you say, "ran as admin," do you mean you went to the actual .EXE of the program, right-clicked and selected, "Run as Administrator?"  I had a similar problem, and that fixed it.  And if that does fix it, just check the box for it by right click -> properties -> [x] Run as Administrator

If that is what you did and it's still not helping, try this: Run the game windowed and open the folder that has the .EXE that it can't find (which is funny seeing as it is running it in the first place), and position the two windows so that you can see the .exe itself somewhere in the margin between the game window and your monitor's border.  Then, around when you expect the error to occur, keep an eye on the .EXE in the folder.  See if it blinks or flashes at all before the crash.  If it does, then your issue is that the .EXE is trying to rewrite itself in some funky way, and is deleting and restoring itself.  If that is the issue, you could try right click -> properties -> [X] Read Only

Also, you may wish to check the version number on the .EXE.  Maybe the Gods of Gaming hate you, and have cursed you with an old file.  If that's the case, there's a link stickied on this thread for how to patch to the "new" version, albeit it's still a couple years old and Steam should only have the updated version.

Tell me if any of thse work for you.  Or, if you've figured it out already, I'd love to hear the solution you found that worked!