My Crossfire ran away

Its not possible that this happened itself. I can imagine that some reg.cleaner damage fl/cf entries but not that it unistall it. Are you sure that no one else have access to pc where you have it installed? ... and if you use profiles, are you using the same?

have you been mean to it?
it quickly gets offended sometimes

the good news is... it cant be far
it has only small legs

It is possible, antivirus programs can remove it and of course a virus can remove it, but it is unlikely that a virus would just remove freelancer.

its unlikely that a virus removes entire folders

Are you using Windows Vista? If so that is probably your problem, lol

I had some time ago issue with my HDD (very likely) on laptop which I first noticed when CF suddenly started crash on jump to one system. I can imagine that something like this can happen also for FL folder -> game suddenly vanish. For me it continued with lagging HDD and solved with reformatting and reinstalling whole system.

I'm using Avast atm... what happened was, after certain update of the antivirus, the program detected that the freelancer.exe was a malware or something, and placed the whole exe folder in the program chest. So, i had to report as false positive and return the whole exe folder back to freelancer folder. i also exclude the freelancer folder/files in the file system protection. But it still occurring. This happened every time when i try to launch the game until i receive another update from Avast.

best solution in every report case is to submit the file to the AV provider to let it manually check

Either they really detect something (they wont)
or
they find nothing and will add the file to their exception list with the next update of the virus databases.

Only putting reported files on your own exception list does maybe solve the problem for you... but it does not solve the problem for other users.

I use AVG and have been since it came out. (6-8 yrs)
The free version mind. And have not have any probs apart from in the past 1 or 2 false positive's.
But now everything is fine.

Some major AV programs use alot of resources, which tend to slow the computer down,
And you have to turn them off so as you can play online games, which is not a good idea.
AVG can be left on all the time, which is why i use it, and I can report I have not had 1 single attack yet,
it reports that they stopped them, plus the added fact you get free updates all the time.

Sounds like the reason he has lost his Crossfire is bc of what has just been said, AV has moved it into its vault.

Rgds

Cygna

I use Microsoft Security Essentials on Windows 7 and 8.1 x64 and Microsoft Freelancer has never been detected as a virus or malware !
It also don't use a lot of system resources, but some might need more protection as webshield etc. I also use secure DNS (Heimdal) so most "rogue" websites are blocked.