I am not having much luck with this problem on another forum, so I thought I would use tap our wealth of knowledge on the SDMB in hope someone here can help. I’ll just do a cut from my OP on the other board:
Since this originally posted on the other board, I updated my BIOS as well. Same problem, no luck. As well, there are now conflicts showing in device manager nor anything else that I can think of where to look.
Any advice before I just reformat this baby and call it a day?
Overheating, methinks. Try opening the case and pointing a room fan into it. If that doesn’t fix it, you can try disabling ACPI. If you want to try this, go into control panel, system, hardware, device manager, computer, right click on “ACPI PC”, click update driver, choose from a list, show all devices, and choose “Standard PC”. Update the driver, reboot, and hope things are fixed.
I find that the report log of Xp errors are not that helpful.
a quick drop to the desktop might mean that your video drivers are not working.
do you have directx 8.1?
you might have to change the compatibility of the program. right click on the shortcut and go to the properties to change the settings to launch using windows 98 settings.
you can check with the game company site to see if they have patches for the game. they may have one for xp also.
overheating usually causes the whole computer to reboot or shut down and not just the program itself.
that’s what i can think of…
Well, tried the ACPI thing FDISK mentioned. No worky. I really doubt its overheating, I’ve got 4 fans on my system and it cools reallly well. Besides, from a cold reboot this AM I tried it immediately and no joy.
Rookie, thanks for attempting to help but yes, they’re all updated. Besides, in my OP I stated that the programs were working fine just earlier that day. No patches or anything were needed.
Oh well, I think I’ll just reformat when I get home this afternoon. That seems to cure everything. 
XP is very, very, screwy. A friend of mine’s Wintel box (running XP Home just like yours) went totally fubar for a couple of days, then reverted back to normal like nothing had ever happened.
I don’t think I’ll be touching XP with a 10-foot pole any time soon.
The operating system fixes itself and you complain? What do you want?
Gah! I just caught this from my OP:
Should be there are NO conflicts showing in device manager!
:wally
Do you have the latest dets installed? You might have a bad stick of ram.
Does this happen only with these two games? If so, it usually means a video driver issue. Make sure you have the updated Detonator drivers installed (and make sure they’re for XP). With the thousands upon thousands of various component configurations and driver combinations one can have on their pc, everyone is bound to run across a game or two that just doesn’t run correctly. Usually a different video driver can make a big difference.
Also, do you have XP Service Pack 1 installed? If not, hit the microsoft site and download it via the autoinstaller. It addresses a lot of compatibility issues.
Good luck!
Do you have the XP System Restore feature turned on? If so, go restore to a point prior to when the programs stopped working. Go to Start–>Help and Support for assistance with the System Restore feature.
One caveat: Anything you’ve done since your restore point will be lost - if you’ve created any spreadsheets, updated your quicken/money, installed any new programs, etc - those will be lost. The System Restore will revert your hard to exactly how it looked when the Restore point was created, right down to the 1s and 0s, so I would back up (if possible) any important documents that you don’t want to lose before using the System Restore.
Failing that, I would tend to think there’s a problem with either the Video or system RAM.
critter42
BTW - Turned out to be a stick of bad RAM.