The cures are all temporary, COD4 multiplayer works, but every couple hours or so, punkbuster B heartbeats stop and I get kicked. Immediate attempts to re-enter of course fail because of pbB initialization failure. i've shut down the vista firewall and allowed permission in the McAfee firewall. When i get kicked, the services admin tool says it's stopped but that it's slated for deletion, so I can't restart it directly.
When i reboot, the services menu doesn't show pbB. But when i get on a server, the initial screen takes a long time and sometimes stop entirely, i assume punkbuster is doing something. Then when i try to enter a server a second time, it connects. This is when it works, sometimes rebooting doesn't make it work.
So the only real cure seems to be rebooting when the heartbeats stop (what is this heartbeat anyway?).
I've put in a ticket with evenbalance, but i don't think they get back to work until monday. Thanks for your help anyways. We'll just have to disagree about the blame and cause for a program that is supposed to automatically update but has to be manually updated by every other user and only causes more problems with each update.
