Game Crashes on Alt + Tab

If you want to switch back and forth, run in windowed mode. If you use your full screen resolution it won't even look any different, but it'll avoid the alt+tab problem.

Always has afaik.      I always quick save before.

I usually do, but I occassionally forget, which leads to much frustration. It also oddly on a couple occasions hasn't crashed. How do you run it in windowed mode?

I second Vinraith's suggestion, but if you're running a sub-spec machine you might still have occasional problems. Since I started playing on a "reasonable" box, I've had no problems at all with ALT+TAB in window mode (disable full-screen in Game Options and set game resolution to match your desktop resolution).

I have, though, recently been "updated" back to having a reliable crash if I put my Vista system into hibernation with GC2 running. I keep the game and my system fully updated. For several months starting in August '07, hibernating sometimes worked but sometimes led to a CTD. A while ago, some mysterious combo of Vista, GC2, and possibly NVidia updates led me to be able to reliably hibernate and keep the game running stably, which was sweet when I was working for some influence wins on Gigantic maps.

Fairly recently, nothing I've done other than try to be a good updater seems to have led to completely reliable crashes after resuming from hibernation. The debug.err files said something about problems switching back to "primary buffer," but Windows hibernation has traditionally never really lived up to its advertising, so I've never bothered to report it here as a bug (I do let Windows call home about the crashes, though).

with my recent computer I can ALT+Tab successfully 99% of the time

though at some point, permanent switching may crash the game, you can use autosave every single turn to "fix" the problem somehow

I know that this is an old thread, but it sums up my problem.  I alt-tabbed out of the game to query this forum about the purpose of the "Find" button and my system locked up.  The screen went black and I was unable to reboot into normal mode (the Windows 7 start logo came up, then the screen went solid black and stayed that way instead of going to the Windows logon select screen), so I had to do a hard shutdown and go to safe mode to run system restore to get things back up and running.  The odd thing is that after a normal amount of boot time, I was able to log into the computer remotely from my phone and run Word (which had been open when things blacked out).  I did not think to try to log in remotely before doing the hard shutdown to see if the computer was running fine, but I now suspect that GCII somehow ate my video driver.  I'm running Win7, but have a godforsaken Vista video driver for the nvidia graphics card in my laptop (which initially shipped with XP, but has a fresh install of Win7).  Has anybody ever seen this?  I couldn't repeat it if I tried and hope to never repeat it again.  I'm running GCII in windowed mode in native 1920x1200 resolution.  Yes, I need a newer laptop for gaming, but it's what I have.  Thanks for any input. 

It happens to me occasionally.  It seems to be when I alt tab out of full windowed and pull up a different background process like firing off Pandora.  Coming back to GC2 might or might not work.  It makes me save a bit more often, and that is the only impact.

  I sometimes get a black screen when coming back to GalCivII from ALT-TAB or task manager.  It can return to normal after a minute or two,  but the quickest way is to press ESC which opens the load/save menu (similar to the trick of moving the mouse about until something reponds).  [EDIT 20 AUG:] Similarly with other PC games.