[jimmyzen]

I am having a problem with EA's NASCAR SimRacing program and recently with Sierra's SWAT 4. After the first splash screen (the intro), the screen goes black as if the game is getting ready to come up, but that's where it stays. I can move the mouse around and the arrow will appear in some places in the center area of the screen. It will also change to the pointing finger here and there. Nothing happens when I click either. The only way out of it is to power down and restart the computer. When the computer comes back up there is no "the system has recovered from a serious error " message. I recently installed a BFG GeForce 6800 Ultra with 256 MB memory. I had this same problem with the nVIDIA e6800with 128 MB memory I replaced. (Oddly enough, the problem didn't occur with NASCAR SimRacing during my brief flirtation with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro that I used between the purchase of the two nVIDIA cards. I didn't have the SWAT 4 game yet.) Half-Life 2, all the other NASCAR sims, Doom III, Medal of Honor Pacific Theater, MS Flight Simulator 2004, UT 2004, Brothers In Arms, Chaos Theory, and all the other games I tried work fine as does every other video related activity. I tried the latest standard driver and am currently using a BETA driver. The PC is a 3 year old Dell Dimension 8200 with a P4 @2 GHz, 1GB RAM running XP SP2. I installed a 580 watt power supply to handle the video card wired as per the instructions. The other hardware includes 120 GB master, 120 GB slave, Audigy 2ZS Platinum sound card feeding a 700 watt 7.1 surround sound speaker system. 52x32x52 CD-RW drive, external DVD-CD RW drive, 120 GB and 160 GB external hard drives, 18" LCD display using DVI connections. Any help would be appreciated.

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see if you need to patch your games.

[starjax]

see if you need to patch your games.

[jimmyzen]

NASCAR SimRacing didn't offer anything other than ending background tasks (did that), updated video drivers (got that), meeting minimum system requirements (system is adequate). I didn't see any patches, etc. offered.

SWAT 4 had nothing other than a demo, a fan kit, a couple of trailers.

I checked out some entries in EA's forum site and saw a few entries with similar problems, but the support recommendations were always the same 3 things listed above.

I also checked out Dell's site for patches, software updates, etc. again, nothing. There were also no entries in the forums about the video card or games.

I sent BFG Tech Support a help request. I haven't heard back yet.

Thanks for responding.

[jimmyzen]

BFG got back to me and suggested there was a problem with the way the video drivers were bonding to DirectX. I followed their advice and downloaded Driver Cleaner, uninstalled my NVIDIA drivers, rebooted into Safe Mode, opened and ran Driver Cleaner for NVIDIA, rebooted and then reinstalled the 66.93 drivers. They mentioned they had found some instabilities with the 71.8X drivers. After all that, when the PC came back up and I launched SWAT 4, it came up although there is no sound. NASCAR SimRacing also came up and worked fine. The strange thing with this (at least strange to me) is this was a first-time install for my operating system, the drivers, and everything else on a reformatted hard drive and as i indicated, I reinstalled the drivers as well as tried others. I guess stranger things have happened. I hope this saves somebody some frustration although in reading through the posts, the approach recommended to me by BFG is everywhere in these forums. Now I know.

[starjax]

Interesting. i wasn't aware they had a driver cleaner. if you have the link hand for that why don't you post it?

thanks,
Starjax

[jimmyzen]

www.drivercleaner.net it's a free download.

[jimmyzen]

I used the aforementioned procedure and driver removal tool on my Creative audio drivers and the sound was also restored on SWAT 4. Everything works as it should now. Again, I hope this helps somebody out.