Crashing a lot...very frustrating

Dueling NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980s. Do you have two monitors connected to your card?
As a test, I would try to disable second one in driver configuration.

Please keep in mind that EQ2 has many thousands of players and majority of players don't have frequent crashes, so the problem seems to be at your side. DirectX 9 is not needed in standard configuration in my opinion, Direct X 11 has everything game needs.

Kheldorm ... I've worked a lifetime so that I could afford this high end equipment ... Deal with it. I only stated my system so that any Dev's reading the thread would know that I wasn't a self-glorified geek that built their own system and assumed they knew more than the Dev's ... they know what I'm running and perhaps that will help them figure out why POP is freaking crashing.

You should really install the mentioned DirectX version in this thread. It will not replace your existing... it adds libraries... downwards... you don't already have. This version is the so called DirectX 9.0c (June 2010). It is the last 'all included' downloadable version in a compressed package, in this case for development, but it forces to install missing files (disabled DX version check) which the 'end-user DirectX webclient' doesn't do.

In case it doesn't help much -> use the ingame display settings and lower the grahpic settings. You can use the 'performance profile'. All above the 'Balanced' setting will lead to an earlier crash. Maybe you can survive the day with 'balanced' or even 'high' setting. You can later finetune some settings.

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For the record (some technical boring stuff):
EQ2 make use of LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE on Windows 64bit. It can use virtual memory somewhere between 3-4GB. That was already discussed in the old sony forum in 2011. That means Windows memory tweaking on your side does not do anything better from preventing EQ2 to crash.

with their issue, i think the DX9c will definitely help.

Hey same one I get every now and then.. and there is almost no one in some of the zones I am in.. NOt sure why it does this must be some issue with Windows 10 and EQ2 game..

it's not, it's a rather common one with no current cure.

Well if that's any indication, I can tell you that while I was testing the Planes of Prophecy Beta when it was active, I used to get blue screen system crashes once in a while questing in Plane of Magic. No problems in live game at the same time.
Guess what? Now I get those blue screen crashes in live game - and not just in PoP zones, but it can happen anywhere. Directx 9 (same from the link in the first page of the thread) already installed, did that some years ago now.

At first I thought it might be my RAM (12GB but since EQ2 is 32bit, not much help), so I ran mdsched.exe in Windows 8.0 after restarting in safe mode, to scan my RAM for any errors. All clean.
My second guess was my Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M (MSI GT70 gaming laptop here) which is an excellent graphic card capable of running Elder Scrolls Online on at least medium settings, and some even max. Nope - no blue screen crashes in any other games like Witcher 2 or 3 (aside of the both game's other internal still-remaining bugs).
So this is not just PoP-zone related problems - they're problems brought when the PoP expac was added to the game. And it's very annoying when my computer crashes every 4-5 hours and has to restart. That is what malicious virus programs, or programs in early Alpha stages can do, but certainly not what a full-fledged game should be doing.

Think of it as you prefer.

Windows bluescreens:
Your general issue description look like the issues many have who wrote in this forum. Except for bluescreens. I don't want to sound omniscient now, but especially in the days of Win8 & Win10 many of of BSOD/bluescreens can traced back on hardware or driver issues. Drivers are connected to the hardware. Because everything in the OS works virtual now the advantage is that a single software can crash and it don't affect other software or even hardware. That's the theory. And that's my experience.

Let's say EQ2 lead to a bluescreen. My assessment is that you already had a hardware or driver issue and EQ2 is only a trigger to make it visible. Because EQ2 can have very heavy CPU load & GPU load. Depends on the graphic settings you set. I have read here in this forum that EQ2 doesn't use the graphic card much. That is not true... ok, it's partial true. It depends on graphic settings. It can use heavy graphic shader calculations that brings mid class GPUs like NVidia 1060 to full load. To come back here: you can see EQ2 as a stress test.
Yeah, there might be possibilites that EQ2 can cause a crash to drivers, directx or whatever, but then EQ2 is again only a trigger and not the problem.

You might be interested to find the trigger the causes the BSOD. My only advice to get quick expert solutions is to make use of the forum of tenforums.com. There are plenty of those forum. They use own written programs that can read out your whole computer logs. It's a matter of trust here. Driver issues are the most common. https://www.tenforums.com/bsod-crashes-debugging/

And if i am wrong, i am humanly wrong. I bake you a cake then.

i agree with lhsan... blue screen of death isn't exactly the game.

To all who have worried over this same problem ... turns out it was my LinkSys Adapter taking a dive. How do I know this you might inquire? Because it came to my mind I've had similar problems in the past, years past, and found out the WiFi adapters have about a 2.5 yrs life span and then they die. Bother that you won't get any messages pointing to the real problem ... you just start having odd communication issues pointing to *everything* else. I pulled out my hard wire connection, yes it's running across my room, down the hall and into the den where router is physically located. Plugged it in and then rebooted EQ II *my love* AND waLA ... no connection problems ... no crashes ... nothing but game playing fun.
* Note to self ... purchase new WiFi device asap.

I'm hard lined into my modem and having these crashing issues.