BATTLEFIELD 2 – RESTRICTION: Service communication failure: PnkBstra.exe

After taking a break for a few months from the game that took up 12+ hours a day of my my mid teenage years I decided to throw it back on the PC after recently formatting and putting Vista back on (bad call considering Windows 7 came out a week after!).

Anyway, I spent 15 minutes doing the usual changes of game resolution, control, inverting mouse and so on then finally hit ‘connect to server’!

Great, punkbuster hit a problem!

RESTRICTION: Service communication failure: PnkBstra.exe

I thought at first it was due to my faith in Windows thinking the built in firewall may assign the correct permission to Punkbuster by default but as I was browsing through my C:/WINDOWS/system32 folder it appeared that Punkbuster didn’t even exist, so it obviously wasn’t a firewall problem, after all there was nothing there to give permissions to!

So, all it takes to get this problem sorted is to jump over to the Punkbuster website and grab an installation of it, or do what I did and just incase Punkbuster did install but something went wrong in the installation grab the PBSVC here. My Punkbuster just simply wasn’t installed but I’d recommend getting the PBSVC just incase there is a corrupt installation.

It’s a self explanatory explanation, a ‘next’, ‘next’, ‘finish’ installation.