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A Temporary soloution to GTA III: Vice City (VC) and/or GTA3 Crashes
Caused by c0000005 Unhandled Exceptions

Warning: Read entire document before making a decision on what to do. A followup was done and the results may mean this is a more user-specific problem than first thought.

I searched the web for HOURS, looking for soloutions and trying simple fixes that have worked for some. For me, GTA3 (which has the REAL GTA3 Mod) works fine, and Vice City used to, until my PC had alot of changes (new video card and full of spyware). All the fixes out there, official or unofficial, didn't work. I read forums, and one post mentioned that the reason was something to do with Thread timing, and the only reason the crash effected XP (or so it seems) is because it is truly multithreaded. After trying alot of things I came up with (Closing MSN, Disabling Norton AV and manually closing a Radeon 9200 Series sys-tray icon and some other 'helper' apps), and still no luck, I decided to look at Task Manager.

On my list the top thread user was svchost.exe, and at the time also had a high memory usage. I decided to kill off just svchost.exe. Ran Vice City - Startup movie. Hit Enter. Splash screen for half a second and tada - WORKED!

Conclusion: All you have to do is close svchost.exe!
Although this program is a vital part of Windows, it appears that due to it using so many threads (because that is the way Windows XP handles its 'Services') it doesn't always give Vice City enough CPU time or thread room (I have no idea im no tech-buff..well not to that extent) to start properly. Im not sure if this will fix in-game problems, but I only ever had to startup troubles.

This is not the best 'long-term soloution', because it IS important to Windows - HOWEVER-- XP will start back up the services it 'needs'. This will use only about 18 threads, instead of 85..Until I start IE and it wraps a ton of spyware with svchost, boasting the count to 36 :P. The only side-effect I notice is the Username column in Task Manager becomes blank..Not a big deal..

So now Vice City works - let me know of your results.

Also, the more long-term soloution is to DISABLE services you don't need. There is a really good guide @ Blackviper.com regarding required and unrequired services.

-- Followup!
I could have SWORN when I played Vice City last night there was sound. But, when going to play it today, there was none and VC detected no audio device. So, the REASON (on my machine), closing svchost fixes the issue is because the Service 'Windows Sound' is closed - this seems to be the cause of Vice City crashing for me. So, if sound is the problem, just STOP this service before playing Vice City - However
you will need to start it again before some other applications can use sound - DONT DISABLE WINDOWS AUDIO! I will be trying to update my sound driver later..Good luck ;).

Hopefully this works for you! Now i'm off to do a fresh install of XP Home (or Pro), and make a permanent switch from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox.

-- 2nd Followup!
I installed Windows 2000 and tried with the same version of VC as before - STILL NO LUCK! (also same result with Windows 98). My friend had a burnt copy of the CDs and with those I installed and cracked his version of Vice City and Ta Da! It was FINE! All good now :).

-- 3rd Followup!
From time to time, Vice City doesnt load on the first shot when I am running Vice City Jukebox. It comes up with some error about debugging division by 0 (and used to load VB .NET too). This appears to be a random error caused by the MP3 disappearing while in use. Partial soloution- Dont use MP3s, or don't use dynamic ones.

--Coolman_mike