Very bizzare crash/technical problem

[Doug-Thompson]

Put R:TW in the drive and it went right to the menu -- none of the Activision logo or animation. Worse, the menu "overlapped". Each time you opened a new menu, the wording from the last one was still visable. The cursor arrow also left a "trail" that won't go away.

I managed to start a randomly-generated tactical game, which appeared to do all right, but still had the menu problem when I got back and couldn't start a single-player campaign.

I suspect the problem has something to do with two very old games -- non-XP -- that I installed for my kids today, but no other game appears to be corrupted. M:TW, for instance, runs fine. I'll re-install R:TW tomorrow and see if that clears it up.

[Red Harvest]

Any chance that one of the old games installed a very old version of DirectX over the top of whatever DX you had been using? I recall some old installers were bad about pulling idiotic moves like that (my other pet peave is when you change the game folder from default, and the installer fails to put the proper path in various locations that it needs--sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.) If so, reinstalling DX should fix it. You might have to reinstall vid drivers after a DX reinstall though...shouldn't be necessary but sometimes the drivers get confused with DX changes.

[Doug-Thompson]

That was my first thought, RH, but Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic runs fine, and so does other fairly new games I've tried. If it was a DX problem, all the recent games should all be scrambled. Weird.

I expect a re-install will clear it up. Just haven't had the time.

[TheDuck]

That was my first thought, RH, but Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic runs fine, and so does other fairly new games I've tried. If it was a DX problem, all the recent games should all be scrambled. Weird.

I expect a re-install will clear it up. Just haven't had the time.

Unfortunately not true. DX games exercise certain interfaces but not necessarily all. You could very easily have those games work but have DX messed up enough to not run a newer game. (I've actually written software to these interfaces, so I know of which I speak).

RH is on the right track methinks.

[Doug-Thompson]

Well, whatever the cause, reinstallation worked.