Episode 1 freezes up

[Baron-of-hell]

Half life 2 works fine, but when i try to play episode 1, when alyx is talking to Dr. Kleiner in the beginning, the game freezes and there are looping sounds.
I don't think its my computer that can't handle the game because i played episode 1 before and then it worked fine.
My drivers are up to date
i have tried the trouble shooting thing at the steam website everything was fine except zone alarm free version (more precise vsmon.exe) is giving trouble. I have updated zone alarm.
I never had this problem and i don't want to shut down zone alarm.
What should i do?

 

[Jintor]

Hmmm.

Is Steam/Episode 1 Allowed through Zone Alarm? Although I don't know why that would be the problem since you're obviously allowed to play up to a point... verify your cache through Steam. ZoneAlarm may be causing the problem, you may have to shut it off to test if it's ZoneAlarm. Don't worry, you're not as vulnerable as you'd think without a Firewall (Although, tbh, I run 3. )

 

[Baron-of-hell]

mmm i tried it with zone alarm off but the game still freezes up with the looping sounds.
How do you check your cache with steam?

 

[Baron-of-hell]

Sometimes i just hate computers, i reinstalled the game and it worked, but halve way true the game it freezes up again.
A well can't have everthing

 

[Baron-of-hell]

aaaaaggggggggrrrrr the game just keeps freezing up.
Does anyone have idea what i could do?

 

[DrBiggles]

Funny that I should see this thread at the top of the list when I just started having the exact same problem. First my game locked up, sounds looping, and eventually gave me a BSOD when I tried to change my screen resolution. Upon restart, the game then crashed shortly after Alex talks to her father in the beginning of Episode 1.

I've never had this problem before, and the only things that have changed since I last played were the addition of a new lcd monitor and an update of my ATI drivers to Catalyst 7.4. HL2 didn't give me any problems since these changes, though.. only Episode 1.

EDIT: Oh, and I should note that I'm not using anything like Zone Alarm, or any anti-virus software at the moment (living dangerously).

 

[tgj]

i have the same problem except afterwards it comes up with an error message saying
"runtime error"
"the program has asked to terminate in an irregular way please contact the program creator."
or something like that

 

[FatboyTim]

I have the exact same problem, and so do many many others:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=500297

;(

 

[Narvi]

Try turning off HDR.