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I have a fairly decent system with Win 7 (4 Gig RAM, ATi HD4650 newest drivers). Followed all the instructions, ran the game with every other program closed, as administrator on a clean install.
The patcher loads and then the instant you click "START" => desktop.
Found that others have this issue. No solution though.
Comments
You need the directx web installler for 9.0c. The game is old, designed for win xp era, so you need older drivers/directx.
Part of the instructions I followed was to install directx 9.0c.
Support gave the same advice and I finally got to the point of sending the results of dxdiag to the company...been a week with no response.
Try the standard stuff? Like firewall, antivirus, roll back drivers? Iunno man, i had this same thing on my laptop and the directx thing fixed it.