[NickCowan]

I just intalled SP2 over SP1, in a bid to fix a problem with hal.dll - i.e., my PC doesn't think it's there, and I was advised to try re-installing XP, and that should fix it. Well, it didn't, so I still have the CD in the drive to get it to start up. This is besides the point.

My issue is that whenever I try to run anything, and I mean anything with directX, my PC freezes and then shuts down. This includes: games such as Tribes 2, My screensaver will kill it, and even running dxdiag shuts it down... help!

[peterh]

Backup your data, reformat C: and start again. Your XP install is definately not working properly...

[pmistry]

Have you tried downloading and installing the full DirectX redistributable? Or perhaps get a DirettX cleaning tool to revert back to a previous DirectX version and then upgrade to 9.0c.

DX Redistributable
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/detai...;DisplayLang=en

DX Uninstaller:
http://www.3dcenter.org/downloads/directx-dx9uninstaller.php

[NickCowan]

I tried the Formatting/Reinstalling approach, but this didn't work. I don't have a proper SP1 or earlier CD, as I had an integrated Acer/Windows CD, which was giving me grief, so I switched to the SP2 one. This means that DirectX 9.0c is pretty much all I have to play with... unless there's somewhere online that I can find that has older versions of it.

[NickCowan]

Right, well I've done a great deal of tinkering, and it's still not working. In fact, a message will pop up, now that i've disabled automatic restart on problem, and it says that my graphics card has had a problem and has decided to shut down. This is very annoying, as I haven't done anything to the card, and 'updating' a file shouldn't make a piece of hardware stop working. I have tried several ways of removing DirectX 9 to replace it with 8.1 which worked just fine, and will run anything I'm trying to get working at the moment. It seems that DirectX 9 is incredibly robust, and nothing will shift it. I've tried the uninstall/reinstall thing suggested, and this didn't work. How, my question now is, did a company with Microsoft's track record manage to make something as tough as DirectX 9?

[pmistry]

So you are saying you have Windows XP working with DX 8.1 and are trying to get 9.0c working?

[NickCowan]

It did work with 8.1, but I can't get it back to 8.1. 9.0c doesn't seem to work though

[NickCowan]

Right, it's fixed. I eventually went to the graphics card manufacturer (SiS) website, and downloaded the newest driver. It seems that clicking "update driver..." in the properties box really isn't enough.

[theefool]

Updating to the latest driver usually fixes these issues. I never really trust the auto update features in some products. Others they are very convenient.....