[STEAM] Tom Clancy's HAWX 1 - Serious problems, unable to play after buying the game after...

Hey, I was enjoying the HAWX Demo and I decided to buy it. It seemed good at the time of purchase.. but after my money was spent, I lost access to the Demo and the full version was downloading, 40 minutes after it was all downloaded and installed, I came across serious game breaking issues.

1. The screen freezes around once every few minutes for what seems like a minute or more.
2. I cannot activate my product key because it hangs at a logging in screen endlessly (I let this go on for a good hour)


I've tried countless things to fix this ranging from a simple uninstall through steam and reinstall, to uninstalling all of my games and Steam followed by deleting any registry keys related to HAWX/Ubisoft, removing any outside files by searching for HAWX/Ubisoft on all drives, then formatting the HDD they were on, finally loading Steam and HAWX back onto them. I've also tried using the game updater located at steamapps\common\Tom Clany's HAWX\Support\GameUpdater\GU_DX9\gu.exe with no success.


I'm confident that I've got no malware on my PC, and I've got no problems with any other game that I own. This is my first and possibly last ever Ubisoft purchase if I cannot find a fix for these problems. Games are supposed to be fun, not a headache, and as it is now I've spent close to 12 hours attempting things and have had no success. I'm posting here because I'm hoping some of you can help me fix the issues I am having, but am not too optimistic about it after today was wasted.

Any help would be appreciated.



Brief system specs
2600K
550 Ti
Max 32-bit RAM Limit
Windows XP Pro 32-bit
Game is running off a dedicated Samsung F3 1tb Drive
DirectX 9.0c
301.42 GPU Driver

Yes I have tried to validate the files, It said it was successful but it did not fix my problems.

I've done that nearly every attempt after the first, even went into the registry as well. I suppose it's easily overlooked by some though, so thanks for bringing it up.

I've got a support ticket open with Steam, and I'm about to start a thread somewhere on the steam forums in a while.

I attempted to restore a backup to another drive and boot from that, but it was unsuccessful and I got booted into my current OS. I'm going to do a fresh install on an empty hard drive and see if I get the problem with that, if that solves the problem I'll reinstall the OS on my main drive. Seeing how the Demo performed perfectly, along with all of my other games I cannot understand how it could require a reinstall, but like I said I'm willing to try anything.

I'll let you know how it goes.

I have already done that, I usually don't have many in the background anyway. Heaviest program I had running in the background during these tests was Steam.