That phenomenon is caused by a corruption of the main.cfg file in either the SH3 folder in My Documents or the main.cfg file in SilentHunterIII/data/Cfg. What usually happens is something is missing in one of them. This can happen when the game crashes as you are saving out of it. The same error can be reproduced when some program has an access handle on the main.cfg that resides in %My Documents%\SH3. When this happens, the game cannot read the settings and "freezes" as described. Also this can occur when you are using a STEAM-version and have not used SFSF.
SOLUTION:
- Find out what program has PRIOR to starting SH3.exe opened the main.cfg (and thereby created an access-handle) and close that program.
- For STEAM use SFSF.
- Copy and paste the following defaults.
[TIME COMPRESSION]
TimeStop=0
RealTime=1
LandProximity=128
CriticalDamage=1
CrewEfficiency=1
AirEnemyDetected=1
SoundEffects=2
CharacterAnim=4
EnemyDetected=8
RadioReport=8
Particles=32
PrayState=8
HunterState=32
3DRender=32
Maximum=1024
The fix is to copy the good one and paste it over/replace the bad one and save, i.e. copy .\Silent Hunter 3\data\cfg\main.cfg %MyDocuments%\SH3\data\cfg should do the trick.
