I've been reading plenty in forums for both Infinity Ward and charlieoscardelta.com and I have found a possible solution. Apparently Punkbuster doesn't like peripherals after this latest COD4 patch. It thinks they're hacks and kills the game. Xfire, vent, etc.

 

Like you may have heard in my previous posts, my COD4 just up and quit after the latest patch. Hadn't played in days.

 

Yesterday after reading a post on the subject, I disabled everything I could in the startup. Went to options in game and turned off punkbuster and then went to a no punkbuster server and...IT WORKED.

 

While I won't be able to play on legit servers until it is patched at least now I can get my fix and start building rank to get my toys back.

 

All I can say is, thank God.

You try and force a PB update? Go to punkbusters webiste and download their update tool and see if you can get it to update CoD4.

I had this problem as well on 2 different computers and had 2 different solutions.

 

First was the latest ATI drivers for my vid card didn't like cod4, it caused a directx error and would just crash upon starting up. Revert back to a later version fixed that.

 

Then had an issue where the game would just quit, sometimes seeming like a PB issue other times not. Found a post that eventually fixed the issue, had to go in and rename one of the files and now it works without any issues. The file was mssmp3.

 

I spent hours and hours trying everything before getting it to work, uninstalled all programs, updated drivers, reverted drivers, shut down all services but the few needed to run, etc.

Riverrat also had success with renaming that file...maybe give that a try doc? check his post.