EDIT: There is some particularly nasty adware on recent Lenovo PCs. See later for more.
I'm having a curious problem with Dominion and at least one other game (Prismata) that I'm hoping one of you lovely people will have some idea about.
On a new Windows 8.1 machine I've tried to play Dominion in Chrome, Firefox, Opera and even IE. The usual behaviour is that I get a completely black screen. Occasionally I'll get as far as the login page, but there's no response after I enter email address and password. Similarly, Prismata will load but not let me login.
The curious part is that I have workarounds for both of these problems. Prismata is written in Flash, and will work if I load it in Adobe's stand-alone Flash player. And I'm able to play Dominion in a virtual machine running Ubuntu, although it's so slow that I've never finished a game.
The Prismata team have a
troubleshooting guide in which they state that in all known cases this problem has been caused by a firewall. I've tried disabling the Windows firewall, with no observable effect. So it looks rather like there's something in the Windows 8.1 software stack that's blocking very specific types of connections, just those from web browsers to authentication servers, and that isn't a part of the main Windows firewall. Has anybody got any idea what might be going on?