hollywood plus

[flyby2001]

can anyone help me

1st i had a creative dxr2 decoder card (which was a pile of crap i might add)uninstalled this card using the instructions given.

all went or seemed to go well

2nd i purchased a real magic hollywood plus dvd decoder card...now when i try to load station.exe it causes a fatal erro and closes...when i can get it to start i get a system266 error message which basically crashes my system.

is there anyone out there that has got the answers of had this problem.

it also says the the decoder card is not a recagnised mci device???

surley it is it's a movie playback device.

please help a frustrated man i'm close to using a hammer on my pc (proberbley the only answer in the end)

again big respect to all of you that know the answers.

fly out

 

[Bartman]

wot OS bud....also wot version of HW drivers.....the new beta 2's work OK for me......check ya UDMA setting in the IDE setup in Hardware configuration.....



Give me as much info as u can bud


Bartman

 

[flyby2001]

win 98second

Thanks for replying i have windows 98second edition

i have downloaded the 2 beta drivers and they are working ok but i can't find a way of making the de-regionalised via zone selector...so i have installed 1.6 drivers and everything seems to working i found a file running called ctfmon.exe when i stop this file everything works as it should...

i have tracked down ctfmon.exe and this is installed with microsoft office xp........sounds strange but every time this file runs in my start up my hollywood card looses it's drivers...anyway to cut a long story short i have permently stopped this file from running (about 1 week ago) and since stopping it everything runs fine...those gits at microsoft messing with ya head again.


if you know a prog or can send me a prog that de-regions the v2 beta drivers then that would be fanstastic mate

cheers for replying

flyby out.......

 

[dx]

Hey bud, I had the same problems as you when going from dxr2 to Hollywood+

Sadly your problems are related to the crappy Creative drivers that are STILL on your computer. Ctfmon.exe is actually a Creative driver from your old dxr2. Its not Microsoft's. Is stands for Creative Feature Monitor (or something like that) and is essentially a media moniter that Creative used to recognise and autostart your DVD's and CD's. It is but one of several files left over from your dxr2.

This is a well documented problem between the Creative and Hollywood+ drivers. The problem occures because Creative's drivers are modified Hollywood+ drivers. Creative does a crappy job with uninstall which leaves SEVERAL drivers intact after install. Sadly your new Hollywood+ and old left over Creative drivers are conflicting.

I've seen some websites that claim to know ALL the drivers you need to uninstall, but most people (like yours truely ) gave up after a few hours wiped the Hard Drive and did a complete OS reinstall. My problems went away after i did this!

I guess the best lesson here is DONT BUY CREATIVE. I know that my Audigy sound card (drivers are just now stable under XP) is my last purchase from them. The company is just too damned unreliable.

Good luck!

 

[desavedo]

Huuh? I have a 2x DVD Creative Labs drive and I have never put the DXr2 Decoder into my system because I use Power DVD 4.0 XP software to decode and I also have ctfmon.exe on my system. Does it automatically install this file when it recognizes the drive because I have never installed any Creative software or Installed the Creative Dxr2 Card in this sytem and I have that file too? I just built this sytem not too long ago.

 

[dx]

Sorry eating crow here.

Ctfmon.exe is actually Microsoft Office XP Alternative User Input Text Input Processor (TIP). It "monitors the active windows and provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies." The creative monitor of which I spoke is locking with this file (both are TSR's). The problem is still the same though, I just got it ass backwards. Sorry!

Problem is related to his dxr2 install. Its a major bitch of dxr2 and dxr3 owners with OfficeXP. So it's a Creative thing (at least in this case anyway). But I can't let M$ off this completely, as this file can lock with other TSR's as well.

You can read about a fix and download a solution here h**p://dvdfix.cjb.net/

OR

You may want to try uninstall, but M$ doesn't recommend as it may cause irratic behavior in Office XP (probably BS!).

Read about it here:
h**p://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q282599

 

[desavedo]

Excellent info dxkim! I knew I've seen this file in my system configuration utility and everytime I tried to disable it (not that I really needed to), after rebooting the system it would be enabled again. I just didn' t know what it was and figured I would try disabling it. I have Office XP Pro too. I agree with you though, stay away from Creative. This is my 2nd Creative Labs 2x DVD w/Dxr2 Decoder and these drives just don't last. I paid $385 back in August of 1998 and it cratered out under minimal use . I bought the Identical drive on ebay about a year ago for only $40 and it lasted until now. The drive still works but it skips and lags as if UDMA is not enabled. I've tried everything and am giving Creative a rest.
I bought a used 5x DVD drive off ebay Yesterday for $9 + ~$6 shipping and hopefully it works . Awful cheap for a DVD drive. The drive is a system pull and has not been tested so it's not guaranteed to work. I decided to take a chance