What version are your Aureal Vortex 2 drivers? Since you've mentioned DirectX 8 in your specs, chances are your Aureal drivers are causing problems. Aureal drivers 4.06.2015 are recommended for DirectX versions 7.1 or newer, the use of newer driver versions (most notably 2041 and 2048) with DirectX 7.1+ is known to cause games to lockup/crash, so it may be worth a shot to try different Aureal drivers.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

What version are your Aureal Vortex 2 drivers? Since you've mentioned DirectX 8 in your specs, chances are your Aureal drivers are causing problems. Aureal drivers 4.06.2015 are recommended for DirectX versions 7.1 or newer, the use of newer driver versions (most notably 2041 and 2048) with DirectX 7.1+ is known to cause games to lockup/crash, so it may be worth a shot to try different Aureal drivers.

Finally!!! Thanks for responding, this game is driving me nuts. I'm using the drivers that came with the install CD so like you say, may need to bump them up.

I'll update them and post the results, hopefully this will clear up the issue. Tried the game on XP but it didn't work on that either.

An update on this: Replaced the Vortex2 drivers with version 4.06.2041 but still no go. So using the -h switch on the command line which brings up the different options I noticed there was an -NoCpuDetect switch so tried that and it runs! But only in D3D with the GF3, still crashes in glide. Will continue to play around with the different switches and see what i can come up with so it will run with my V2's.