Curse

Chthon · Mar 10, 2011, 08:09 PM // 20:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bullfrog

I think it could be because you are using non-standard characters in the path (ie. 〈眙Ъ or "˝Ч or 鶨޾ depending on the post ). I know that I've had trouble naming templates that use non-standard characters in the template name, so the trouble may extend back to the path name as well.

Does OP perchance have a non-American-English copy of Windows?

The characters you're getting are definitely from the upper planes of unicode. Some of them appear to be Chinese characters, some Greek (or possibly Cyrillic - I don't speak either language), and some are mah-jong tiles. (No, I do not have the slightest f-ing clue why the designers of unicode thought mah-jong tiles were important enough to deserve to be characters.) And, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that you could sit down with a unicode table, covert those nonsense names to hex bytes, then interpret those bytes using ASCII or ISO-8859-1 or somesuch and get a perfectly intelligible name out of it.

Now, why are your directory names getting processed using the wrong character encoding? I'll be damned if I know. But at least I'm pretty sure of the what if not the why.

Ebeneezersquid · Mar 11, 2011, 02:52 AM // 02:52

Nope. Perfectly normal American copy of Windows. Doesn't even have any language packs installed.
The Mah-Jong Tiles, as you called them Chthon, appear differently in explorer then when pasted into the forum, usually as a floating point (ie a period halfway from both the top and bottom of the character space as well as side-to-side). the rest come over the same. I don't know which is the "correct" unicode interpretation.

As for good news, got a response from ncsoft:
"We are setting up a system with a similar configuration to test for the issue that you are having. Please be patient and we will send you an update as soon as possible."

Will update the thread with the solution as soon as they have one for me, so the next guy doesn't have to bang his head against this particular wall.

Snograt · Mar 11, 2011, 02:11 PM // 14:11

The "mah jong" tiles are character not displayable with your currently installed language packs.

Can't wait to see the resolution of this issue - I've never seen anything like it!

I'm still willing to bet that it's something to do with your custom install, though

Ebeneezersquid · Mar 17, 2011, 03:18 AM // 03:18

Got a response from NCsoft:

Quote:

Hello James,

So far, we have been unable to reproduce this issue.

Where did the GwSetup.exe that you are using come from?

Please download the Guild Wars client by clicking on this link: http://www.guildwars.com/download . Then completely uninstall Guild Wars, delete the Guild Wars directories, and run GwSetup.exe to install the Guild Wars client.

Is that where you had downloaded the installer from? Is there any change with a fresh download? Do you still get the < foledr with this download?

Please let us know the results.

Regards,
Timothy
NCsoft Technical Support

My response:

Quote:

GW uninstalled 2128 CST
CCleaner run; no registry issues appear to reference guild wars: all registry issues fixed, 2130 CST
Spybot Search & Destroy run: System internals check finds only a broken shortcut for guild wars on my desktop. Fixed 2132. Spyware check begun 2132.
"G:\Guild Wars" Directory and all subdirectories deleted. (16 subdirectories with non-latin-character names)
"E:\Users\Miles\Documents\Guild Wars" deleted.
"C:\Users\Miles\Documents\Guild Wars" deleted.
Spybot search and destroy Spyware check completed 2139 CST. All issues fixed.
Computer reboot begun 2140 CST
Computer reboot complete 2141 CST
GWSetup downloaded from "http://www.guildwars.com/download"
GWSetup.exe activated 2143 CST
Install location chosen of "G:\GW"
Downloading begins 2144 CST
Downloading completes 2149 CST: Guild wars auto-launches.
Login at 2150 CST. Downloading of Great temple of Balthazar area files begin.
"E:\Users\Miles\Documents" does not contain a Guild Wars Folder
"C:\Users\Miles\Documents" does not contain a Guild Wars Folder
"G:" drive contains both "G:\Guild Wars" (empty) and "G:\GW" (containing "Guild wars.lnk", "Gw.dat", Gw.exe", "Gw.tmp", and subdirectory "G:\GW\〈矪Э\Guild Wars" (empty).
Great Temple of Balthazar (346MB) loaded 2205 CST.
"Load from template" attempted: empty directory
"Save to template" attempted: "The skills Template "\Test" has been saved."
no change to both C and E user directories.
"G:\GW\͕P\Guild Wars\Templates\Skills\test.txt" has been created.
"Load from Template" attempted: empty directory.
"Save to template" attempted: "The skills Template "\Test2" has been saved."
"G:\GW\͕P\Guild Wars\Templates\Skills\test2.txt" has been created.
Experiment: copy "G:\GW\͕P\Guild Wars\Templates\Skills\test.txt" to "G:\GW\〈矪Э\Guild Wars\Templates\Skills\test.txt"
"Load from template" attempted: empty directory (experiment failed).
Logged out of Guild Wars 2212 CST.

I have downloaded the GwSetup.exe from the guild wars main site at each attempt.
I know from previous experiments (see GuildWarsGuru) that manually creating the C or E user guild wars directories has no effect.

Would a backup of my registry hive be of use in determining the cause of the issue?

Thanks,
James <redacted>

Quaker · Mar 17, 2011, 03:27 PM // 15:27

At this point I would start with "format c:" and go from there.

Btw, you have many drive letters on the go - what sort of drives and/or partitions are you using?

Ebeneezersquid · Mar 19, 2011, 01:59 AM // 01:59

Problem Solved!
apparently, there was some bizarre problem with the user account. Creating a brand new Admin User and using that account solved the issue.

As for my Drive setup:
C: - a 32GB SSD hosting the OS
D: - a 1TB Mass Storage Drive (movies, downloads, etc)
E: - a 75GB "Apps" drive, holding word, spybot, etc
G: - 200GB drive full of games.
F: - optical Drive
H:, I:, J:, K:, M: - 52-in-one Flash card reader. I wish this grabbed a drive letter dynamically when something was inserted, but nope.

No fancy partitioning. when you have that many physical drives you don't need them.
I'm working on moving Mass Storage to a network share, at which point I will see if I can move Apps to the 200G, Games to the 1T, and pull the slow 75G.

Snograt · Mar 19, 2011, 07:11 AM // 07:11

How much do you use that card reader? Unless you have multiple format cards that you need to read frequently, I'd ditch the damn thing. The extra drive letters used to drive me mad until I got rid of it - and the only cards I use are SDs and Memorysticks - DS and PSP respectively, so never go near the PC anyway!

I have C, D, E, F and G too - 2 physical HDD, 1 logical and a DVD. There might be an H knocking about too - BD emulation mounted by some software or other. Haven't had an A or B since I was in short pants.

Quaker · Mar 19, 2011, 03:04 PM // 15:04

It's good to see that the problem is solved.

I have a similar drive setup - minus the SSD. I have a 500Gig drive partitioned into C: (150Gig) for the OS etc., and D: for apps and data; two 500Gigs in a RAID1 for backup/storage as F:; a DVD drive as E: and a card reader as I:, J:, K:, L:.