SOLVED - SWTOR Freezing when trying to log in to a character or instance

Hey everyone

Just wanted to let the community know that I have had a lot of trouble with SWTOR on my Dell Latitude E6420 laptop. The machine itself is more than capable at running SWTOR, including PvP and raiding.

The issue I was experiencing was that sometimes/often loading between instances would make the game freeze on the loading screen without a loading bar. This would essentially put the game out of commission until a restart of the game.

Being a software engineer, I had to peek under the hood. The reason I found for this was because when you play SWTOR and load between instances, in the background SWTOR is actually composed of two processes, swtor.exe and swtor.exe who communicate to each other.

What was happening was that swtor.exe(1) was waiting for swtor.exe(2) to finish loading so that it could use a file called DiskCacheArena as a buffer file. However, swtor.exe(2) was waiting for swtor.exe(1) to let go of the DiskCacheArena file now because for the loading screen and loading process it had to put something into DiskCacheArena. For the technical amongst you, this is a multi-process deadlock.

On Windows 7, a really, really simple way to fix this kind of issue was to do the following:

1. Game has frozen while zoning to instances
2. Open the Windows Menu (bottom left hand corner)
3. Type in 'cmd' without quotes into the text box at the bottom
4. Right click the cmd.exe process and left click 'Run as Administrator'.
5. At this point, you'll get a greyed out screen with a Yes or No option. When you get the option to allow cmd.exe to Run as Administrator just say No and go back to SWTOR.

This interaction between the UAC seems to reset the deadlock that occurs. You don't need to run any program, just somehow trigger that particular Yes or No window.

Hopefully that helps some of you in your gaming. There was a point where going between Fleet and Corellia I had to do that every single step of the way: Fleet to Ship Hangar, reset via the UAC prompt, Ship to Space, reset again, Ship to Corellia Hangar, reset again, Corellia Hangar to Corellia proper, reset again and finally Corellia proper to Blach Hole with a reset for good measure.

For BioWare, if you pass this on to the dev team, I'm sure they'll be able to sort it out.

Hi i am having a problem trying to play the game. when i click play on my character screen, it loads fine but then it gets stuck on the main SWTOR loading screen. i can actually hear the game in the background. i.e. the music, when i hit the directions buttons i can hear the footsteps of my character, the sound of my lightsaber flourishing etc. I was wondering if help me.

Have you played successfully before ? have you run the repair utility ?
A dxdiag would help to get an idea of your setup, but first things I would try is re-install directx 9 and remove and re-install the video driver.

If you are in fullscreen mode what happens when you Alt/tab out and backin or Alt/Enter ? any change ?