"Play online viewer has stopped working" Please someone helpFollow

After playing FFXI for 10 years, I now have met a real problem, I cannot connect to my main character. I log in to everything just fine up until the very last phase, where the screen goes black and begins to load my character, and right before I actually get into the game, I get the message 'play online viewer has stopped working' I must then close the program. What's even more messed up is, my character actually loads up, because when talking to linkshell members on vent, they say, I'm actually logged in! They cannot send me tells, because I'm in offline mode or something. I can however log into my mule which is on the same account just fine. So yes.. I can log into my mule, play it, everything just fine, which is on the same account, but no, I cannot log into my main character... My main character recently was updated with the guildwork plugin, so thinking that may be the issue, I removed the guildwork plugin from my windower file, I even tried re-installing the newest version of windower, and I even tried running the game without windower altogether and I still receive the same message!!

I am at a loss, I have tried everything, renaming certain plugins, like recast, and so forth, trying everything and anything, and nothing works, I still cannot play on my main character, yet it does get logged in... This is so messed up, no my account isn't hacked, because its still wearing same gear etc, because I can see it, when you go to select which character I want to play. It hasn't left port jeuno, etc. Everything seemed to be fine, before I recently activated the guildwork plugin, and used the flush command to have everything show up on FFXIAH. I actually logged into FFXI just fine after I did this the day after, but just once, I decided to check my mule, and when I tried to log back into my main character, I have had nothing but the same problem "play online viewer has stopped working'.

It's not my computer or graphics card etc, because, like I said, I can actually play my mule... which is on the same account, the only account I own...

If anyone has had this happen, and or knows how to fix this, please help, I'm at the point where I feel like I must re-install all of FFXI and playonline etc... this really really sucks, anyone please please help!

Have you tried running the file check in playonline to see if any files have been corrupted?

If you use dat modifications, reverse them back to originals and see if that helps. File check wont replace dat mods with original files. This is the main reason people ALWAYS say to track your dat mods manually. Depending on the dat, mules will load properly if the bad dat associated with your main is not being accessed when you log in with a mule.

To me, the problem you descibe sounds exactly like a corrupted file.

In my experience, file check won't always detect a bad file. The first thing I would do is to try logging into your account on a different computer.

Assuming you are successful on a different computer, move your character to a different zone, then try logging in on the computer that was giving issues previously. If you're now able to log in without error, then you've got a corrupted file.

If the check file utility doesn't find any issues then you'll have to either re-install the game from scratch (or from torrent) or you'll have to overwrite the game directory with a known working copy.

If you're using Windows 8, in my experience you'll need another Windows 8 install to overwrite the folder.

Zones seem to be more than a single DAT, so while one being missing could make everything go wonky, knowing which ones you need is the tricky part as when my game had come across this problem, grabbing a couple files from a friend didn't fix things.

I zoned my mule into the same zone as my main character, and I can log in and out freely with my mule in the same zone. I disconnected my modem for 48 hours and had a new IP address and I encountered the same problem.

I have tried running FFXI without windower, same problem.

I have done everything short of a complete uninstall and re-install. Which seems now to be my only option.

I have my suspicions about guildwork and what affect this has had on my main character.

The night before I started having this problem I had updated guildwork fully and did a /flush command to update FFXIAH with full updates on my character. I really believe this is somehow the root problem. Only my main character was selected on guild work for the update as my mule wasn't and is currently unaffected by this.

Is there a way to completely remove myself from being logged into guildwork when I log into the game? I thought windower only allows this but perhaps I am wrong? Perhaps if I go to the guildwork website and remove myself, this would correct the problem?
I'm almost dead certain that guildwork is somehow related to this problem, if it is, then perhaps a re-installation won't solve it?

Once again, I appreciate all the help, I really do, anything helps.

I think I had the same problem before and in my case the only way to fix it was to reinstall completely, as file check would not fix it.

Also if you can log on to game from any other computer / console you should still be able to access the character although in my case not even moving character fixed it but if you can still access its definatly the problem already mention where a file is corrupted.

Edited, Feb 19th 2013 1:15pm by BlueLand

I will attempt to re-install this weekend, is there a latest version of the game I can pickup from somewhere? I want the latest obviously, and well, I don't want to wait for the new expansion to come out.

I will keep you all updated of my progress.

Thanks for the help.