Here is a brain scratcher.

[Sarge 1/68th Armor]

Processor:
AMD Phenom II Black Edition X4 965 4 core @3400.2 Mhz (liquid cooled)

Ram:
Vengeance DDR3 16 GB with heat sinks

Hard Drives:
Soon to be Samsung 250 GB SSD and a WD 3TB secondary HHD

Motherboard: MSI 870A-G46

Video Card;
Radeon Sapphire HD 6850 with 3D Steroscopic 1 GB GDDR5


Power:
Extreme 850 watts

[opus]

So far so good. Logged in and ran two games without a hitch. I did find out Father is a real unforgiving weenie in the Harrier.

Wait till you try me...

[Sarge 1/68th Armor]

Hmm......What do you charge?

[opus]

Unlike STU, im not a cheap little B**** ... You will have to drop atleast 20 dollars to get with me!

[A FLYING COW]

This is/was happening to me! I think it has to do with Origin somehow, because it started happening after I installed/uninstalled it. I re-ran a PB update thing that I downloaded from a website. It worked well for a bit. Now it just happens on/off again occasionally.

IT. IS. SO. ANNOYING.

[ryeontherocks]

Hi Cow
i hope you had a great vaca!! i am still jealous btw...you should try it now and see what is happening...

[Trench]

This is/was happening to me! I think it has to do with Origin somehow, because it started happening after I installed/uninstalled it. I re-ran a PB update thing that I downloaded from a website. It worked well for a bit. Now it just happens on/off again occasionally.

Can't picture any obvious way in which the installation then uninstallation of the Origin Battlefield 1942 would affect an existing CD-based Battlefield 1942 installation, for what it's worth. Installation of another game like Battlefield 3 or Battlefield 4 would potentially upgrade the installed PunkBuster core services to be something different than what the CD-based installation installed. But the Origin-based Battlefield 1942 installation doesn't deliver any PunkBuster services, so that alone wouldn't create the same kind of collision.

One thing we do know at this point is that if your Battlefield 1942 game crashes, and you reconnect fast enough to get the "A FLYING COW_17"-type name because your old connection and name still haven't timed out, you also end up with a blank CD key hash on your "A FLYING COW_xx" connection. This is what lead to the "duplicate key kick" Sarge described, because at the time he reported it, Origin-based Battlefield 1942 players were all getting blank CD key hashes unless they had manually set a "real" CD key into their Origin-based registry locations.

So Sarge's "crash and reconnect quickly" in turn lead to "kicked for duplicate key." As Rye recommended, we now know the server is fixed so Origin-based Battlefield 1942 clients will get a CD key hash generated even if they are still using the Origin-issued CD key. That wouldn't "fix" your or Sarge's blank key if and when your BF1942.EXE game is crashing, but would make it less likely for you to encounter someone else who also has a blank key hash when you quickly reconnect. So indeed the "duplicate key kick" symptom would be less likely to occur now, but the underlying problem (crashed Battlefield 1942 game on your computer) would presumably still be occurring.

Which exact symptoms of Sarge's original posts are you continuing to see? And if the game is terminating and dropping you all the way back to the Windows desktop, is there any message window such as "BF1942.EXE stopped working" that Windows puts up, or is it just "silent"?

-Trench