Call of Duty Multiplayer Crashing on Startup

Call of Duty Program Folder

So I have been playing COD online the last few days. Yesterday we had a small power surge around here. Nothing big, but enough for my machine to die and reboot. It came back just fine which was good, but for some reason the game would crash every time I tried to start it in multiplayer mode. This was the weirdest thing I have seen lately.

I digged out my CD and reinstalled. After the whole lengthy process of reinstallation, the game crashed again! Furthermore the first time I run it the damn thing asked me if I want to start the game in "safe mode". This was a fresh install, so I just knew that there must be some persistent config file somewhere.

I went and scanned through the registry, but I didn't find any COD entries. Good to know that the game does not mess up registry. Next stop was the program folder. That's where I found two suspicious looking files one was servercache.dat and the other one was __CoDMP. They certainly looked like persistent files that would store info between sessions. The servercache.dat obviously stored information about game servers, and the __CoDMP file seemed to be responsible for that "safe mode" dialog. It seems that it gets created every time the game starts, and then removed if the game shuts down properly. I don't have it on the screenshot here because the game ended nicely this time.

I was willing to bet one of these files was causing the crash. I moved both of them out of the game folder, and lo - game started properly. So, if anything like that ever happens to you, go ahead and delete these files.

Tags: call of duty, call of duty multiplayer, call of duty crashing, call of duty multiplayer crashing, cod crashing cod mp crashing