Black screen on startup

Whenever I start Medieval: Total War, I get a flurry of disk and CD activity, followed by a brief mode-change flicker, then a black screen, which only a hard reset will clear.

Config: Athalon 1.2Ghz, 512MB RAM, GeForce4 Ti4200 (latest drivers,) GameSurround MUSE XL (latest drivers,) AMD/Via chipset (latest drivers,) DirectX 9.

I have tried:
1. Update graphics drivers,
2. Update sound drivers,
3. Update IDE drivers,
4. Close all background apps,
5. Play around with desktop resolution & colour depth,
6. Purge NVidia drivers and re-install (using Detonator cleaner from guru3d.com)
7. Adjust sound hardware acceleration,
8. Re-install M:TW in a different location,
9. Use my other CD drive,
10. Scandisk, disk cleanup, degfrag.

Any further suggestions? M:TW used to work fine for me about 6 months ago, when I played last. The only major config change is that I have since upgraded my GeForce2 MX to a nice new GeForce4 Ti 4200.

Sometimes the latest video card drivers are the culprit, you might try rolling back to some old standard like 30.82 or 41.09, I currently am running mine with 30.82 and have no troubles...LOS

You're absolutely right I rolled back to 41.09, and now everything works just fine

I appreciate you're not the right person to ask this question, but are you aware if I lose anything by going back to these drivers, performance or compatibility-wise?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by [b

Quote[/b] (CSmowton @ Oct. 28 2003,18:04)]You're absolutely right I rolled back to 41.09, and now everything works just fine

I appreciate you're not the right person to ask this question, but are you aware if I lose anything by going back to these drivers, performance or compatibility-wise?

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Glad that did it for you, you should not experience any loss of performance and as to compatibilty, if the game functions better with these drivers,that makes them more compatible then doesn't it? LOS