26 Nov 2011 CTDs, freezes, and one light blue moron

Kind of irritated with the game at the moment. Logged in this morning, two AOs up. One is very active, defending Popering (specifically a huge battle for the allied FB).

Only one RAF mission up, St.Omer to St. Omer...Point Defense. There are 11 Spit 9s, 13 Spit 5s, and 4 Spit 2s. No bombers of any kind.

Spawn in a Spit 5 (it will do better as a ground attack if there is no enemy air). Hit my map key and game freezes.
Repeat, only this time it freezes after I start engine.
Three crashes later, I get my plane into the air, climb up to 8k alt.
Circled north a bit to come in from the NW of Popering, rather than a straight line from the St Omer air field. Saw 3 blues on radar, and 3 cons on the deck. Remembering what happened to me last time, I keep an eye on the cons, and sure enough one turns red.

Its a 190, swooping down on a light blue con, and he has a dark blue one chasing him. I can't dive at him from this angle so I just watch and circle some more. I report the 190 on Ch55, and as soon as I hit the send button, I see THREE red cons, all coming towards town, below me by 2k, and apparently all swooping towards the guys on the deck.

I report "3x190 at fb bnz", and roll upside down to look at the situation. One of the FWs is trying to strafe the FB! The other 2 are already climbing up and away, so I go after the low one. Below me I see a light blue con also chasing the 190, but on the deck. I make a pretty decent gun pass on the 190, but he's turning and jinking really hard, trying to dodge ground fire I suppose. I break off my pass and climb up and circle again, trying to keep an eye out for the other two. No sign of them and a few blues in the area, so I reacquire the 190 and make a much shallower dive on him. The light blue ally is still after him, and about 300 yards before I will fire, I see a red con diving on me from the NE.

I turn towards the guy diving and steepen my own dive gradually, then turn nose low to the north, and he overshoots me (apparently he went red out, because he didn't pull up, just plowed into the ground). Saw the original 190 passing left to right in a wide circle, rolling a lot but not really displacing himself off the path he was taking, so I cut across the circle and tried to lead him with cannon fire. Dropped in behind him and and followed him in a circle, throttling back and shooting at him in short bursts. I saw a big chunk of his tail come off, but it apparently didn't do enough to down him. At this point I realized we were both circling low and slow so I changed my direction and broke out of the circle, just in time to see tracers pass over my right wing from behind me.

I did as hard a turn to the left as I could (I remembered to ease up a little so I was not quite blacked out), then rolled over and reversed.

Its the f--king light blue ally shooting at me, not an enemy plane. In fact there are no other enemy to be seen anywhere, except my wounded 190 climbing away steadily towards the North Sea. This dipstick keeps following and shooting at me, while I try vainly to pursue the 190. Total waste of time, as I can see the 190 turn grey, and his range circle keeps getting larger. Decided to RTB, since I have 11 rounds of cannon ammo left, and no red cons in sight anywhere. I fly back to St. Omer and land, pretty much raging the whole way. Checked my AAR, got a hit on the 190, but no kill.

Decided to take a break and calm down, after I caught myself trying to look up how to send a PM in game (so I could ask the moron why he was following a blue plane and shooting at it). Decided that the CTDs might have been from a power saver setting and/or Norton 360 trying to do background tasks. Changed the settings on power saver, and made a note to shut off Norton before playing WW2OL next time.

Went back twice more today, not much available for RAF units, so I flew some sorties in a P38. Got shot down on the second one, because I got tunnel vision and was enjoying strafing the enemy infantry too much. The instruments in the p38 are terrible to try and read, and the reticle seems too bright and intrusive, but it flies pretty smooth.

Sounds like you had a s*** DAY

Went back tonight, lots of air at the town of Leper, unfortunately it was 90% Allied. After flying around practicing checking my six, I got bored and asked if they needed resupply for the RAF at St Omer. A chap named 'kkelly9' cheerfully accepted and set me up a mission. Dezey popped in for a bit, but I wasn't on TS so after a brief exchange of hellos and such, I lost track of him.

There was a constant bug, where each mission I'd land (RTB) at St. Omer, cancel my reservation (so the 'Unit Manually Resupplied' message would show up) and then the game would hang up. I couldn't ever respawn again from my origin field - it would click like it was loading...then nothing for about 30 secs, then it would appear in game as the camera circled around my plane and DESPAWNED back to the brigade screen. Every time. I'd end up exiting the game and relogging to get back in. After the 3rd time of that I just told the guy I'd be relogging each time, and he parked himself in the mission (while he did HC stuff, like moving brigades around). I let him know each time I lifted and landed, and when I lifted with the last of the Mark 9s, he flew his out to St. Omer as well.
I ferried ten Mark 9 Spitfires to St. Omer for 61 Sqdrn, thanked him for the chance to help out, then logged for the evening.