given that i also have some legacy hardware and a GeForce FX 5200, i gave this a test, and sure i seem to have the exact same issue as you do, with the driver refusing to load regardless of what i tried (VC++ 6.0, IE6 and SP6a were all already installed, so there should be no issue with that). however, further testing revealed that slightly older versions of the driver do not have this problem, they will run as expected, at least on my setup (specs in the attached screenshot), more specifically:
- 61.76 is the last version to not have this issue
- 43.45, 56.64 and 61.72 will also work fine
- 66.93 and newer, including 71.84 and 77.72, are all broken
i think support for the FX 5200 (and maybe other cards too) might have become buggy/broken on NT 4.0 drivers at some point, or maybe there is some sort of incompatibility with my BIOS or chipset. i tried changing the AGP memory aperture size, as well as switching between 1X and 2X modes, but it did not make a difference. doesn't surprise me since nvidia likely did't care much about these NT 4.0 drivers in their later years. ForceWare 61.76 can be found at the Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040723092939/htt … ternational.exe
http://web.archive.org/web/20051225122438/htt … nt4_english.exe
