Eve Online Trinity breaks PCs

As expected, the latest upgrade for CCP's massively multiplayer online role-playing game Eve Online went live yesterday. The expansion, Eve Online Trinity, overhauled the game's graphics engine, and added new ships, stations, and stargates as well. For some users, it also deleted a crucial file on their computers, preventing them from booting up.

According to a CCP developer posting on the game's official forums, Trinity was deleting the boot.ini files of many Windows XP users who upgraded from the game's old client to its new client. The boot.ini file determines Windows' operating system options during startup, and the computer cannot start normally without it. A computer with a missing or corrupted boot.ini file is not permanently broken, but it does require some proficiency to repair or replace it.

"We apologize profusely for this error and are working on offering more extensive help [to] those that have a non-working Windows PC, so please stay tuned," CCP said on its official Eve Online Web site.

Windows Vista users were not affected by the issue, nor were those who installed the full Trinity and Eve Online game from scratch, instead of updating an existing copy of Eve Online.

[UPDATE]: This afternoon, CCP announced that it fixed the issue with the update and released a version it said is safe to download for all users. The company also posted instructions affected users can follow to repair their systems.