Looking at the Requirements and Patch sections on the old Codemasters page, the game was written for DirectX 6. The Patch page indicates that DirectPlay Version 6.1a is included with the official Version 4.1 patch. When you install the game, do you completely bypass DirectX 6 installation, or do you let it run and install any needed components? It might pay to let the DirectX 6 installer run during game installation.

Also, you don't mention what graphics driver you are using with the NVIDIA card. There might be a sweet spot for compatibility with regard to the NVIDIA driver version, so you might do some experimentation there.

I skip DX6 installation but I let it install DirectPlay which it asks for separately, and that seems to install fine. When I tell it to install DX6 from the installer, it says I don't have enough hard drive space for that (of course I have oceans of hard drive space, I assume it's just poor "onerror" coding in the installer; when I try to install DX6 separately from the game CD it just says that I have a higher version already.) Anyway, when the game did work in the past, I was also running DX7 or higher.

For the Ti4200 I use the V81.98 drivers. The reason for going with these recent drivers is that my PC really did not like the older, "safer" ones causing me to have to do a full Windows reinstall more times than I can count. With 81.98 I finally had no crashes/errors (if I'm not confused with other issues, I think it were nasty VxD errors upon booting W98) and a nice 3DMark score. I can try to roll back to a recommended V40.something (don't know by heart) but I'm afraid it will brick my system *again*. But it might be the cause of the issues, as the Ti4200 is the only truly relevant change in my config compared to when it did work. The only other thing I think about is that in the past I did not have the proper chipset drivers and maybe the game doesn't like AGP 2x or something like that?

I installed the 43.45 drivers, and that didn't help. Luckily the pc still works. Setting AGP at 1x also didn't help. Disabling the sound card didn't help.