How to fix performance issues caused by rundll32.exe/gameux bug

[Karlotta]

Found another alternative to shooting down the rundll32.exe every time you play, here:

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/f...597996108/

It consists of renaming C:\Windows\SysWOW64\gameux.dll to C:\Windows\SysWOW64\gameux so the system doesnt try to do what ever that does.

Don't know if doing that will screw up other games or not, but it worked for me. After doing it, pressing "Launch Game" starts the game on first click and there is no 50% CPU-munching rundll32.exe anymore.

To rename the file you need to give yourself special permissions which is kinda complicated (there's a video on youtube that shows how to do it), but before I tell/link instructions for that that someone who is more computer-savvy than me can say if this is a good solution or not. The best would obviously be if discoteam found a solution that doesnt require manual player intervention.

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[Kazinsal]

Splitting this off into a separate thread so as to not clog up the bug report thread with troubleshooting posts.

This is really interesting. GameUX seems to be the Windows Game Explorer shim. Not much information is available on it in the wild, and a cursory search with my MSDN account doesn't show anything useful. I'm not sure why this started happening out of the blue, especially because A) the feature was removed from Windows 10 in release 1803, and B) I can't see any reason Freelancer would suddenly start being something Microsoft would care about backporting some strange game registration shim into 16 years after the game's release and four and a half years after the affected OS's end of general support.

I'll see if I can pull anything out of a copy of gameux.dll on a Windows 7 machine that's up to date. The one on my Windows 10 machine is just a stub.

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Retired, permanently.

[Gray_Mouser]

Found another alternative to shooting down the rundll32.exe every time you play, here:

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/f...597996108/

It consists of renaming C:\Windows\SysWOW64\gameux.dll to C:\Windows\SysWOW64\gameux so the system doesnt try to do what ever that does.

Don't know if doing that will screw up other games or not, but it worked for me. After doing it, pressing "Launch Game" starts the game on first click and there is no 50% CPU-munching rundll32.exe anymore.

To rename the file you need to give yourself special permissions which is kinda complicated (there's a video on youtube that shows how to do it), but before I tell/link instructions for that that someone who is more computer-savvy than me can say if this is a good solution or not. The best would obviously be if discoteam found a solution that doesnt require manual player intervention.

Had similar problems under Win7 as the ones Karlotta described and gave renaming the .dll a try when I wasn't really able anymore to fix the problem by canceling process rundll32.exe. That fixed the rundll32.exe problem but now freelancer seems to eat up quite a bit of memory. Anyone with similar trouble?

[Karlotta]

Nope. Right now my Freelancer.exe task is taking up 215 MB. Don't know exactly how much it did before but this doesn't seem like a lot. And what do you mean with "wasn't really able anymore to fix the problem by canceling process rundll32.exe"?

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User was banned for: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...tid=200950
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[evanz]

mines 216 same as karlottas. seems normal

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-...-in-vista/

add "ownership" to your "right click" then you can rename the gameux.dll to gameux

winrar the original 1st

[Kazinsal]

Working on a way to detect when this happens and automatically solve the problem. Will post more when I have more.

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Retired, permanently.

[WesternPeregrine]

I can comment that my Windows 7 is also affected by this strange behavior, since the recent string of Disco updates.

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[Thunderer]

I had the same issue a couple of days ago, thought my PC was installing a Windows update for a suspiciously long time. The process used 100% of my CPU and I had FPS lag in Freelancer.

Windows 7 Professional, SP 1, 32 bit
Intel Celeron 2 x 2.6 GHz
Intel HD Graphics (integrated)
3.2 GB RAM

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[Chronicron]

Same. My Disco install was jiterring aswell as of the latest patch.

Windows 7 Prof SP 1 64 bit
Intel Core i54690k 3.5 ghz
Gigabyte GTX 970 4gb
16 GB RAM

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[NoMe]

i don't know if it can help more, but it seems that in fl companion, we can't set the directory, normally i know how it works.