Having trouble getting into the game with Station Launcher

[Frenzywolf]

<p>Are the servers still down? I looked at server status and it says they are up but when I try to launch into the game it says</p><p>"Login rejected: The client's version does not match the server's. Please rerun the patcher."</p>

[Russer]

<p>I've been having the same problem for at least 3 hours now.  I initially chalked it up to an especially long hotfix downtime and egregiously unsynced server status pages, but coming back from lunch to the same problem was rather surprising.</p><p>I've gotten the same error message before, when the launcher failed to recognize that a new update/patch was available, but I've been able to fix it by forcing it to download some extra content (turning on/off the TCG, switching regions, etc); that is not the case this time.  I've also tried deleting EverQuest2.exe and letting the launcher replace it, and breaking Launcher.exe's checksum so that it would hopefully replace itself, but the problem persists.</p><p>Traffic during the login procedure seems to indicate that the launcher is not properly interpreting the server response for {launcher.station.sony.com}/plugin/npsoeact.dll.ver --that is, the response is "95:http://launcher.station.sony.com/plugin/95/npsoeact.dll.sig", but the launcher never follows through and requests npsoeact.dll.sig (perhaps the URI is a deformation of "http://launcher.station.sony.com:95/plugin/npsoeact.dll.sig"?).  Instead, it continues to connect, reconnect, and do SSL handshakes and initial data requests until it (seemingly) times out and presents the "Play" button, etc.  This fits with the seemingly disproportional amount of time the "Login" button spends looping the activity animation, but I have been pretty consistently experiencing that normally, so it is probably not related.</p><p>Since this thread is the first I've found reporting the subject since I started looking 3 hours ago, I'm going to take a shot in the dark and guess that it's a problem with our version of the launcher.  I have read a lot of passing descriptions of the launcher by other users which refer to features that my version does not have (most notably, a "Full Scan" option, or any way to force an update check).  I'm not sure what the descriptor for this version is, but it is a dedicated EQ2 launcher (not a station launchpad) with a web browser/Silverlight player as the main component and no standard WIN32 form look and feel (edges are "jagged", etc); the window title is "EverQuest II Streaming".</p><p>Hope this helps someone.</p>

[Tyrus Dracofire]

<p>check your task manager, it maybe running in background when you last log out.</p><p>it should go away, but it didnt.</p>

[Russer]

<p>Thanks, but no cigar--nothing explicity SOE-related in the (full) process list, nor anything that would have a reason to spawn such processes.</p><p>I was doing something else when I realised that the "95:" prefix was, of course, a module version number and not a port, so I did a little digging and was unable to find a matching version number for any of the obvious component choices (I assume 95 is the internal version, though); however, I did notice that clicking the "INFO" button at the launcher's login screen asserts that it is version 3.0.0.244, while the VS_VERSION_INFO structure for Launcher.exe denotes it as 3.0.0.121, and Launcher.dll's denotes 3.0.0.140.  Nothing particularly weird about that, since they're separate components, but I think my next step will be to download a new launcher and see if mine cached a bad version number or something.</p><p>By the way, I didn't think to check this before, but running the client writes "Couldn't load .xml" to ui.log.  Given the most prominent error message, this is most likely a snowball symptom, but given that my .downloadinfo.txt lists some UI components being recently updated, that'll be where I turn next if the new launcher is a bust.</p>

[Russer]

<p>Hmm, no go with the new Launcher.  I downloaded a fresh web installer from <a href="http://everquest2.station.sony.com/install" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://everquest2.station.sony.com/install</a> and installed into a new directory and although it goes through the first-run procedures like displaying the EULA and epilepsy warning and asking for controls preferences, when it got down to business time, my connection was refused for the same reason.  Odd.</p>

[Russer]

<p>Whoops, one quick addendum to my last update (I didn't see a way to edit the previous post), the ui.log for the new install had a new error message:</p> <p><cite>ui.log</cite></p> <blockquote><p>Couldn't load .xml Encountered data outside of container tags Encountered data outside of container tags Encountered data outside of container tags Encountered data outside of container tags</p></blockquote> <p>It looks like the last update might have tweaked a UI configuration file and accidentally left it malformed. I'll see what I can find.</p>

[Russer]

<p>Well, I did a casual visual scan of all the XML files in UI/Default and there were an awful lot of them with little anomalies that different parsers might choke on (carriage returns ('r', 0x0D) or doubled carriage returns, a 3-byte UTF-8 character preceding about half of the XML version tags, case-incorrect attribute names, extra space between attribute names and values, and newline literals in attribute values), but without a less vague debug log and knowledge of the parser implementation, I'm afraid I'm of no further use here.</p><p>Oh well, back to reality.</p>

[Russer]

<p>Success!</p><p>I decided to give it a go again today (the problem did not alleviate itself), and I found that the launcher was caching (keeping and using old copies) HTTP responses used to check for the current version of the game.</p> <p><strong>Here's the workaround:</strong></p> <ol> <li>Make sure that the Launcher is not running.</li> <li>Go to the Windows Control Panel and doubleclick "Internet Options" (you may have to find it within a category if you are using XP or Vista's category view--it may be easier to "switch to classic view" at least temporarily)</li> <li>If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7: <ol> <li>On the "General" tab (should be default), in the "Browsing history" section, click the button labelled "Delete..."</li> <li>You should now see a window with checkboxes next to various types of data that the browser holds onto. Select any that you won't miss; if you don't know what they are, make sure they are unchecked, but <strong>make sure that "Temporary Internet Files" is checked</strong>, and also <strong>"Preserve Favorites website data"</strong> if the option is given.</li> <li>Click the "Delete" button at the bottom of that window and wait while Windows sweeps up the old cobwebs.</li> </ol> </li> <li>If you are using Windows XP: <ol> <li>On the "General" tab (should be default), in the "Temporary Internet Files" section, click "Delete Files".</li> <li>You should now see a small window with checkboxes for what you wish to delete. Make sure "Delete all offline content" is checked and click "OK"</li> </ol> </li> </ol> <p><strong>Note #1:</strong> Your first time browsing sites will possibly be slower than normal (as the content has to be downloaded fully now), but after visiting them once the speed will return to normal.</p> <p><strong>Note #2:</strong> On the first launch after doing this, the Launcher may sit and spin its wheels while just displaying the EQII logo (possibly due to problems negotiating data transfer details). If this happens, right click on the launcher's taskbar button and select "Close" or end the process in Task Manager. Running Launcher.exe again should work this time.</p> <p>For more information on Windows' Temporary Internet Files, see <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260897">this older Microsoft Knowledge Base entry</a>, and for information on the deletion process under Windows Vista and Windows 7, see <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278835/en-us">this newer Microsoft Knowledge Base entry on Cookies</a>, which are a different type of temporary Internet file and are deleted in the same manner.</p> <p>Hope this helps.</p>

[Russer]

<p>(I'm just adding this post as speculation and info which I hope can be of some assistance to the developers, and is not important to anyone else.)</p><p>At first blush, it appears that Microsoft Silverlight Player was the culprit in my case, as the requests for the files which could have been at issue (most notably the appconfig response from the lpconfig server) identified the user agent as Internet Explorer 7.  While there are other instances of Silverlight signing requests (not literally) as itself, even within the same request sequence, the only IE I have currently installed on that machine (to my knowledge) identifies as IE8; also, it appears that EQII embeds a Mozilla Gecko engine, so I presume the launcher uses the same library or simply embeds the Silverlight player component without another browser supporting it.  Thus, my haphazard guess based on rash assumptions is that this version of Silverlight contains an IE7 core for HTTP transactions outside the scope of Flash/ActionScript-or whatever Microsoft's equivalent sub-technology is.</p><p>Of course, it'd be easy to slap a per-file/per-directory Apache directive on the problem, telling the server to append a no-cache or must-revalidate Cache-Control header on the problem resource(s) (although somewhat trickier if PHP is set to fiddle with response headers), but since I have absolutely no clue what your infrastructure is like, I'm not sure why I'm even still talking.</p><p>I love it when troubleshooting ends in depressing introspection.</p>

[Zerebro]

<p><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"><h1><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">If I follow that weblink install I get this:</span></span></h1><h1>This webpage has a redirect loop.</h1><div><p>The webpage at<strong><a href="http://everquest2.station.sony.com/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/get_the_game/install" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://everquest2.station.sony.com/...he_game/install</a></strong>has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.</p></div></span></p>

[Hikinami]

<p>I tried cleaning my browsing history, no go yet. I'm continually getting this error message.</p><p>There was a problem moving C:Program Files (x86)Sony Online EntertainmentInstalled GamesEverQuest IIlp_tempEverQuest2.exe_delta_8783_303.patched to C:Program Files (x86)Sony Online EntertainmentInstalled GamesEverQuest IIEverQuest2.exe.</p><p>I've looked through the file and can't find either one of these to delete to try and fix it. Also I'm running windows 7.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 0px;"> </p>