The problem is, it has never happened to me so I haven't been able to debug the process to find out where it's crashing. More debug messages wouldn't really help all that much. I could add some saying when it's entering and exiting certain portions of the program but it wouldn't do much good if I can't debug it to begin with. Sorry.
I let two weeks go by so I could try to cool down and look at the problem more clearly, but I still can't get it to work. I really wish I was having a known issue with a rumored fix like the other people who posted here. To tell the story again, I'm just installing Abyss, not Tiara, and I've disabled data folder read, disabled extra thread option, disabled windows defender/security essentials, and installed all .NET frameworks or VC++ redistributables. There really doesn't seem to be any issue with the files themselves because on this exact same machine I'm able to run the client.exe from my current operating system using the installation of Mabinogi+Abyss on both my old hard drive and my new one, but I'm not able to run either installation using my new operating system.
I'm thinking it must be some kind of problem in the operating system environment. As a programmer, I've previously installed tons of languages, development kits, and libraries that all would have affected my system variables, path, and registry over the last 2 years I've been using this OS. Last time I did a fresh install of Mabinogi was for the Aces: Merlin patch because my packages start with 173_full.pack. Aside from some part of my history allowing me to run the game, maybe there is some new backdoor installation crap that Nexon could have included with the 183 installer which I am using to install the game.
I wanted to be sure that this is not some isolated case that I am having on my PC hardware, so now I tried installing the game on one of my old PCs which I've been using as a Steam Box (Steam in-home streaming). This old PC has been working great for me for over 6 months and I never installed any games on it (because I do nothing but stream to it). On this PC with a new installation of Mabinogi and Abyss, I still can't get it to work.
FML, I can't get it to work when I have usually been impervious to the same pitfalls that other people fall into. I know you don't owe it to me to fix this issue, but I'm almost 100% positive that given the same circumstances you could recreate this issue: installing a new Windows 7, getting all of the updates from Windows Update, installing Mabinogi from the v183 installer, then installing Abyss. I want to suggest that maybe you can do this on a virtual machine, but an installation of Windows 7 with all the updates takes 30 gigabytes of hard drive space. You'd have to allocate 50+ gigabytes just to try this out and there's not even any guarantee that VMWare or whatever can run the game to begin with (without mods).
I don't even know what to do at this point, I've become completely dependent on Abyss patcher for multi-client support, it's been very convenient for moving items back and forth with my mule. darn these Nexon NA pricks for not enabling multi-client support. I heard the Korean client already got multi-client support over a year ago, but we get no such luxury. The last thing I'll do I'll uninstall my installation of Mabinogi on my old operating system old hard drive, and then reinstall using the v183 installer and run with regular hackshield to see if it really was some backdoor thing given by the new installer.
Mabinogi Status