System Hang w/ascending patch

[Astarae]

This is not a bug I can chase or narrow down.  But since the new ascending patch, if I bring up B&S and leave it up, I've seen 1-2 hangs per day if I leave BnS going -- even if my character is sitting in the lobby. 

 

Noticed 1 time, with BnS up and minimized,  a climbing CPU usage XIGNCODE.  I figured I better kill both the game and xigncode as I didn't know what it was doing.  First I tried a rt-click on the game to bring up option to close the process (this isn't a 'kill', but simply a request for it to exit).  Nothing.  It ignored me.  Tried again -- same.  Figured if it was ignoring shutdown, it wasn't good.  So figured I should kill it.  Brought up another tool, but before I could scroll down to the BnS group, system hung.

 

BTW, when I say hang, I mean nothing is moving on screen and kbd+mouse are dead: cursor won't move, and Caps-Lock won't toggle the Caps light and Ctl-Alt-Del won't clear the screen nor offer to let you reboot or shutdown the system.  Only option is to power-cycle the system.

 

Have had this happen with game minimized but also up and running normally, like standing around in a public area 

(near wind-walk destination).  I decide to go lie down for a few minutes, but end up falling asleep -- come back and character still standing around w/others on the screen, but no motion --  all is dead.

 

This was how BnS was when I first started playing with the symptom being reduced after the first time the game was patched during a downtime and going away entirely after the 2nd patch+downtime.  Hopefully, it won't last much longer.  Running on Win7SP1 x 64bit x 96GB RAM w/6134 CPU @ 3.2GHz w/8 cores (threading turned off).

 

I know its not really possible to figure out the cause, at this point, but figured I should post something to provide data and the notice that there was a problem w/newest patch.

 

It does tend to hinder playing BnS, as I start to equate BnS with having to power-cycle.