Game hangs up whenever I kill something!

[Bruno]

Ok, this is pretty bad.

Current version of the game, a completely normal game (no mods, no other programs, pure vanilla). Normal difficulty, oddity.

Lvl 8, I walk out of SGS, towards GSM, to clean out some loose ends.

Whenever I kill one of the local rathounds, hourglass appears, and game stops.
I reload several times, try different rathounds, the same thing happens.
If I instead go down to the underpassages and kill a stalker, hourglass appears, game stops.

It seems like I can not kill anything without crashing the game.
What in the world is going on??
(I can access the menu, save/load etc fine, but not take actions in the game)


Edit:
I exit the game and start it up again from desktop, and then it is ok. Phew.
But I wonder what causes this hangup.

[Sanger]

It's something to do with the sound output device changing while the game is running. Has happened to me too.

See if you can duplicate it by plugging some earphones in, booting the game up and loading a save, unplugging the earphones and then killing something.

[Bruno]

Sanger, that sounds right, because this has not happened before, and this is the first time I connected a set of bluetooth earplugs to the computer, and then turned them off while playing,  changing sound device back to the pc speakers.

This is a strange bug, but probably reproduceable, I will test it out a bit more.

[Sanger]

I originally thought the game was lacking a handler for attempts to play sfx through a no longer connected device, but the bug only appears to occur in the specific case of things being killed, so... yeah, it is strange.