After two hours of stepping through memory dumps, I found it:
A buffer overflow in the zone name parser. A corrupted string had overwritten the last 10 bytes of the zone lookup key. The original zone code was something like pregen_fx_mp_ff (pre-generated effects for multiplayer free-for-all). But a stray pointer wrote garbage into the middle of the string — swapping _ for random chars, and dropping the final underscore.
The server wasn’t looking for a missing zone. It was looking for a corrupted version of a real zone name.
If the error occurs when accessing files from a network share: could not find zone codepregfxmpff
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System" /v ZoneMapping /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
Then restart.
Applications that handle multiple code pages (e.g., converting between Shift-JIS, UTF-8, and Windows-1252) sometimes create temporary "zone codepage" objects. A memory corruption bug can produce the string codepregfxmpff as a placeholder for a missing code page prefix. After two hours of stepping through memory dumps,
Because this error is uncommon, general Google searches may yield little. Try these specialized forums:
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Before attempting fixes, verify the error’s scope: