The latest additions to Half-life 2 seem to be more suspectible to certain network monitor programs and firewalls behaving badly. I recently purchaced Episode 2 extension for Half-life 2 and immediately noticed that something was wrong with the game. Right in the main menu, the background animation and sound stuttered so fiercely that it was impossible to even start the game. Funny thing was, none of the other games had any problems starting (HL2 or Episode 1), so I quickly concluded that this probably wasn’t a hardware or driver problem.
Search from the Web revealed that similar stuttering-problems had been noticed by other users as well but the solutions didn’t apply to my situation. I didn’t have any Nvidia firewalls or network monitors running. Or so I thought.
Having recently attended Mark Russinovich’s session about using Sysinternals Process Monitor to troubleshoot various issues with applications and drivers, I decided to give it a try.
Rather quickly I noticed some weird behaviour by HL2.exe while the game stuttered in the main menu. The process was continuously accessing certain registry key, namely HKLM\SOFTWARE\XUEBROTHERS\. This is how it looked like:
I didn’t know I had any software by XueBrothers installed but by searching from the web about WS2LSPX I realized I had the “WIMS” IP & Socket Monitor installed and running. It was trying to monitor the traffic of HL2.exe and probably due to a bug decided to read the registry a little too frequently.
Uninstall of the WIMS fixed my Episode 2 problem completely.
hi. i really need to get this game going and i have just the same problem. how do i find and uninstall this “WIMS” IP & Socket Monitor”???
You might not have that program installed (look at Add Remove programs) but rather some other tool that does something similar. Go ahead and try Process Monitor to see which process might be doing something while you launch HL. Also, try and update your video and sound card drivers.