PnkBstrB.exe heartbeats stopped

CPT-A.Cantu[3rdID]

I keep having this issue where after about 45 to 60 minutes of gameplay, I get notification,

*WARNING*: Service Communication Failure: PnkBstrB.exe heartbeats stopped

Then about a minute later I get notification,

PunkBuster Client: PnkBstrB service installed and started successfully

Then about 30 seconds after that I get kicked by PB for 0 minutes.

Not sure why this keeps happening. Any suggestions?

vapor.i

Have you ran pbsetup? http://evenbalance.com/index.php?page=pbsetup.php

Do you have UAC (user account control) active? If so, run steam as administrator and see what you get?

CPT-A.Cantu[3rdID]

yea, done both of those. This just started happening a few days ago. PB is working, as I can play for at least 45 minutes, often over an hour before I get this issue and then get kicked. Its usually later into a long match when this happens.

m_hermann

try this:
www.punkbuster.com/downloads/pbsvc/pbsvc.exe

Wraiths_Defiler

Resurrecting this thread as I think I may have found a solution. I had the exact same issue where it would say pnkbstrb.exe heartbeats stopped after about 30-60 mins of gameplay.

After over a year of trying to find a solution on the web and coming up with a ton of "reinstall pb" instructions that didn't solve the issue, I took a closer look at my services.msc.

When you look at the pnkbstra.exe and pnkbsterb.exe service properties they say the paths to the executables are C:\WINDOWS\system32\PnkBstrA.exe and C:\WINDOWS\system32\PnkBstrB.exe.

So I took a look at that location and lo and behold, they are not there. So I looked around some more in my computer and I found them actually located in the C:\Windows\SysWOW64 directory rather than the system32 directory.

It seemed to me that if the services.msc thinks the files are in system32 when they are not then that may be causing issues with the files being loaded correctly. I copied all PnkBstrA and PnkBstrB files (.exe, .ex0, and .xtr files) to the system32 directory.

I played for about 2 hours tonight without the "heartbeats stopped" message appearing even a single time. Maybe it's dumb luck or maybe this fixed it, but I thought I would share this since I know how frustrating this can be (and because I know it's not just AAPG - this was first noticed on BF3.)