IMO Win2K is good enough for Win9x-era games, sometimes even better and more stable, as long as your hardware supports Win2K natively.

Win9x/ME drivers can be a hit or miss and it was very common for the system to freeze for no apparent reasons while ingame. With Win2K this happened considerably less frequent.

It may be better to just use Win2K in this case. I had a Coppermine system in the past and had a similar experience.

What's funny is I never used 2000 back then because it seemed to be more problematic! I didn't have it on my machine because my NIC was not compatible, but my buddy had it and he had loads of problems with it. For all the bad press ME gets, it always ran perfectly for me. Better than my buddy's 2k machine!

I wonder if it's a matter of updates. Not being able to run Windows Update on the ME install like I would have 25 years ago might be a reason here that it used to work and doesn't now. Whereas the 2k install I have has the last service pack already included so maybe that's why it just seems to work out of the box.

Just for fun I put 98SE on it and it has the exact same problems as ME. Again, both 98 and ME worked for me 25 years. Shrug! Very strange. But I'm very happy to be able to play Blood now under Win 2k, it runs beautifully!

Maybe there’s something funny going on with your graphics card. It seems kind of suspicious that you can’t figure out exactly what it is.

Back in '99 I had a P2 400, 64MB ram, 16MB TNT later upgraded to a 32MB GF2 MX with both Win98 and NT4 (later 2000) dual boot.
Win98 was for games, everything else was in NT/2k.

Even back then Win9x side felt less responsive and definitely crashed more, but I guess we were used to it back then and thought nothing of having to reboot multiple times a day.
I don't think I ever really tried playing games in 2000 back then. Everyone said it wasn't as good as Win9x, probably more a tie over from NT4, and the OS was definitly more resource heavy.

I guess with XP people started to realise the NT side of Windows can play games, also hardware was more powerful so we could lend the OS a bit more resource power.

I was also surprised when getting back into this hobby how well WIn2k does in Win9x games and is now my preferred OS of choice for this era, only dropping back to Win98 for the few games that don't like 2k

Given that video playback is slow, I feel it's PIO mode being forced on the IDE controller. Sometimes Windows will force this when there's too many read errors, which includes from CD-ROM drives.

The question may be whether the i815 chipset was as compatible with ME as i440BX was. All though I feel it ought to, since they were about the same time, right?

For no apparent reason my gut says to look at the audio drivers. Maybe remove them entirely (ie no sound) and compare performance.

I base this on nothing. I have no idea why I even think it.
But it's easy enough to test.

Is DMA turned on for the SSD in ME?

For anyone who might land on this page in the future with the same problem, I think I know what might have happened. I was perplexed again today because out of nowhere, Blood 2 started acting up again. Same OS and video card, and I don't believe I changed anything, it just started acting weird! Same issue I was having in Windows ME!

Poking around I noticed my video driver was from 2003, which I thought was strange. I THOUGHT I had installed a driver from 2001 or so. Near as I can figure is somehow Windows updated the driver. I don't know if it auto-updated (it is connected to the network), or if a game or version of DirectX I installed since originally installing Blood 2 somehow gave me a newer driver, but that's what I think caused it to stop working correctly.

So that led me down the driver rabbit hole again, and the whole time I was having a hunch it was related to V-sync, as many older internet threads talk about. But what is weird is even with the version I had installed, I could disable V-sync and it didn't seem to make any difference. But I ended up installing the Asus drivers for my Geforce 2, version 56.55 and as I was poking around in there, I noticed that the way you turn V-sync on/off is different than my previous drivers. I decided to try it again, to disable V-sync always, and by gosh it worked! Blood 2 runs beautifully again, even without messing with max FPS.

So here's what I'm thinking. Whether V-sync is on or off, and possibly even THE ABILITY to turn it on of, seems to change with version and card manufacturer vs reference drivers. The card I had back in the day was a Hercules card, which I can only guess had V-sync disabled by default, whereas later Windows ME reference drivers had it turned on and no way to turn it off. When I installed JUST Windows 2000 and Blood 2 this time, whatever version I had had it off, and that's why it magically seemed to work. But through some sort of update, it got turned back on.

Anyway, this version of the driver seems to "stick" with the setting, so Blood 2 works!