[quadrophoeniX]

Sorry to bother you with that - didn't find an answer after serious search.
Is there a way to disable the load screen with a flag?
Here is the reason why:
Since a while all FSO builds are fubared on my machine, freezing shortly after a mission so bad I have to shut down everything so debug does not wor either - but - and I think that might help getting behind it, because:
When I load FSO it shows the title screen. It won't load the pilot selection though unless.. there is a little window lurking behind that screen (error message or similar) where the mouse would appear  standard windows style, when I klich that area and press "esc" loading proceeds and I can do everything - beside playing a mission.
It used to run fine with all those build on my machine up to now, no alterations had been maede beside ofadding those glowpoints however I doubt a coherence with that...

[aldo_14]

Have you tried running in windowed mode to (move the window and then) see the error message behind?

It could be glowpoints, i.e. a texture not found error.  I'm not sure where those are loaded and thus when the missing texture would be detected.

[WMCoolmon]

Yeah, try windowed mode so you can see the error.

To disable the loading screen, you need to move mv_core or mv_zpack to another folder outside the Freespace directory tree; if you're playing a mod with a custom title screen, you'll have to move another file as well.

[quadrophoeniX]

thanks to you!
unfortunately it has nothing to do with that - that was just my firewall which since a recent upgrade finds something picky about the FSO exes - funny it gave no warning before. But - alas - disabling that does not cure my system. I tried a fresh install but no avail.
What i do know it that it seems something related to d3d8.dll so probably more a system error than SCP related, still running same hardware and drivers as before - strange...