3D Games Quit Before Running

Describe the specifications of your home computer. Dual core or quad core is recomended to run this game.

Keep in mind it WAS running perfectly before --- something happened. The PC has always been prefect with these games - up til a couple of weeks ago.

It still sounds like it could potentially be a windows update problem which has now caused a problem with your video driver. There have been cases where the latest video drivers or updates have caused conflicts with some games and some systems (stability issues). The latest video driver is by no means guaranteed to be the best.

From my experience with similar problems I lay the blame squarely on video drivers (and to a lesser extent Direct X). My advise is to check the video driver forums and find out which video driver is best for your system and the games you are running (again, the latest video driver is unlikely to be the best for you).

When something very similar happend to me (I blame automatic windows update, which I disabled but the damage was already done, and I tried everything you mention) I downloaded a slightly older version of the latest video driver (the one the forums said was the most latest but stable), UNINSTALLED the existing video driver (I cannot stress this enough), then installed the new one. This fixed the problem and the conflicts.

Yes good point. I have also had Windows update turned off for so long I shudder to think how far "behind" the PC is.

Microsoft on (rare) occasion has overridden the "windows update" settings and force fed updates whether you had updates turned on or not. Most people leave the updates turned on (for obvious reasons) so when this happens it isn't widely recognized (they would have gotten the update anyway so nobody notices.) I'm betting either MS updated without your knowledge or one of the other programs on the machine did and didn't bother to tell you.

I think I'll do a bucketload of DVD backups tonight and use my off-peak internet time to do a supa-dupa windows update. I'll let you know the result - hope I'm not yelling when I do.

Thanks for the help.

Possibly your boy is getting better and now taxing the video engine

If it's caused by a windows update. Unistall the game and reinstall it. Contact Micosoft that there is an issue caused by their latest update and maybe they can get to work on a hotfix for you, because if it's happening to you then it's happening to other people. They won't know the issue unless you tell them about it.

If I remember correctly, I had these kind of issues too. What solved it for me was turning off MS firewall and using a different one.

Alternately, you might be able to do something in the MS firewall settings and not have to turn it off.