T2 w/ XP Crashes After Mission Screen! Help!

[magnum0766]

Before downloading Windows SP2, I played Thief 2 Gold with no problem on my XP desktop. Now, I can't play it! Thief 2 installs without incident, I get the mission overview w/ Garrett's voice over, and the mission screen. Then the game starts looking all pixilated, as if the game is running in safe mode. About 2 seconds later, it crashes, with a Windows error message. I tried looking at some of the fixes on these threads; tried removing the ; from the ;safe_texture_manager in the Thief 2 folder. I tried doing the Start - Run - D:\setup.exe -lgntforce, still no luck. Chose the "install Direct X 7" option during install. I'm stumped. Anybody out there know what to do?

HP Pavillion 752
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.00GHz
1.95 GHz Processor
512 MB memory
Intel(R)82845G/GL/GE//PE/GV Graphics Controller

[Peter Smith]

I have no idea why it was working before and stopped working other than the obvious: SP2 did it. That does not help, I know.

You have done your homework and tried the right things.

It sounds like you have finished playing the AVI movie and are starting the game itself when it goes squirelly. If so, this may not apply. If it has anything to do with playing the movie, however, I am aware of a problem with SP2 and movies. There is a fix to that mentioned in the FAQ at the TTLG Thief General Discussion forum.

On-board graphics are notorious about causing problems. It is possible that your on-board graphics chip or its drivers have something to do with your pixelated effect. The first thing I would do is to install the latest drivers for the graphics chip and see if that works. Another possibility is to get a separate video card, preferably a good one if you want to play T3. You will probably be very pleased with the performance in any case. Good luck, and please post back if you find a solution.