NBA Live 2005 Windows 11 problem

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NBA Live 2005 Windows 11 problem

Postby boxMAN29 on Fri Feb 27, 2026 2:31 pm

I have been having this strange problem with NBA Live 2005 (and 06) on Windows 11, first of all, most of the time when I open the game, it crashes back to desktop without an error after a few seconds on black screen, other times it loads fine, I'm not sure if it's my specs or if it's Windows 11 totally screwing the game up, all I know is that this happens, Compatibility mode doesn't work either (get an unable to start correctly when compatibility mode is enabled)
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Re: NBA Live 2005 Windows 11 problem

Postby Andrew on Fri Feb 27, 2026 2:42 pm

Dee has been able to get both games running on Windows 11, so they should be compatible as far as I'm aware. Other people have had issues though, so suffice to say Windows 11 hasn't been perfect with its backwards compatibility for everyone so far.

It could just be a corrupted DBF file in the games' temporary folders. Sometimes that issue will throw out a Codebase Error, but other times the game will just crash before it can boot without giving an error message at all. What you can try is going to Documents\NBA Live 2005\database and Documents\NBA Live 06\database, and deleting all of the files within the workingdb and currentdb folders so that both are empty (the game will always refresh the files in those folders as needed). Make sure that you don't delete any of the folders themselves. If there was a problematic DBF file, allowing the game to refresh from the default databases should get everything going again.

Hopefully that's all it is, but if not we'll see what else we can try.
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Re: NBA Live 2005 Windows 11 problem

Postby boxMAN29 on Fri Feb 27, 2026 3:25 pm

Andrew wrote:Dee has been able to get both games running on Windows 11, so they should be compatible as far as I'm aware. Other people have had issues though, so suffice to say Windows 11 hasn't been perfect with its backwards compatibility for everyone so far.

It could just be a corrupted DBF file in the games' temporary folders. Sometimes that issue will throw out a Codebase Error, but other times the game will just crash before it can boot without giving an error message at all. What you can try is going to Documents\NBA Live 2005\database and Documents\NBA Live 06\database, and deleting all of the files within the workingdb and currentdb folders so that both are empty (the game will always refresh the files in those folders as needed). Make sure that you don't delete any of the folders themselves. If there was a problematic DBF file, allowing the game to refresh from the default databases should get everything going again.

Hopefully that's all it is, but if not we'll see what else we can try.


Didn't work, problem still persists, maybe it's my specs
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Re: NBA Live 2005 Windows 11 problem

Postby Andrew on Fri Feb 27, 2026 5:21 pm

Do you have any other games of a similar vintage with similar system requirements that you could test to see if they're working on Windows 11? I'm trying to find some more troubleshooting info.
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Re: NBA Live 2005 Windows 11 problem

Postby boxMAN29 on Sat Feb 28, 2026 4:45 am

Andrew wrote:Do you have any other games of a similar vintage with similar system requirements that you could test to see if they're working on Windows 11? I'm trying to find some more troubleshooting info.


No I do not, these are the only 2 games I'm having trouble getting to run properly on Windows 11, yes, I'm using the fixed executables over in the downloads section
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Re: NBA Live 2005 Windows 11 problem

Postby Andrew on Sat Feb 28, 2026 10:43 am

Windows might be flagging them as malicious and stopping them from booting almost immediately. You could try adding exceptions for them in Windows Security.
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