Hi Everyone, Got a slight problem with this video card ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 128 MB AGP and can’t figure out what may be wrong. Problem is when trying to play one of my older games Age Of Empires II The Kings and also expansion The Conquerors, the beginning cinematic play fine but after when the game should go to the main game menu I get a black screen and nothing happens, no error messages nothing. Alt/Tab won’t even bring me back to the desktop and the only way to get back to the desktop is to Ctrl/Alt/Delete bringing up the task manager. Screen is 800 by 600 at this point (normally at 1024 by 768) and the colors are inverted very hard to make anything out. Task manger tells me that the program is not responding, the mouse moves across the screen, pull down menus in task manager seem to work but when I click end task nothing happens, when I choose restart computer nothing happens, start menu comes up, but when I try to log off or choose shutdown or restart nothing happens. Only way out is hard shutdown with power button. Other games that do work are Age of Empire I and expansion Rise Of Rome, Age Of Mythology and expansion The Titans, Need For Speed Hot Pursuit II are just a few games that I like to play and work without a hitch. Odd huh. Here are some of the things I have tried to fix this problem. I downloaded and installed the latest video card drivers from ATI (Catalyst 3.9). I flashed my BIOS. I downloaded and installed the latest sound card drivers from Creative Labs (SoundBlaster Live 5.1). I already had DirectX9.0. Made sure that there aren’t any Windows Updates that I may have missed. Disabled and re-enabled AGP Fast Write in control panel and BIOS. Changed the monitor re fresh rate from 75 Hz to 60 Hz and then back. Also changed the refresh rate in DxDiag / Troubleshooting / Override to 75 Hz. Also tested DirectDraw and Direst3D in display of DxDiag. (No problems). Moved the Hardware Acceleration slider one and two notches back in the trouble shooting section of the display settings. Uninstalled and reinstalled the games. There is probably more that I have tried but can’t remember cause I’m at work right now. I was very tired and frustrated last night when I finally gave up and went to bed. Oh, btw. Before I bought this video card I had an Nvidea G-Force 4 64 MB PCI video card and I didn’t have this problem under XP, the only problem I had was that the games would run slow and jerky. System Specs: Windows XP Pro SP1 AMD Athlon XP 1700+ CPU (not over clocked) stock heat sink and fan Gigabyte VIA 133 chipset Motherboard 1 Gig PC 133 SDRam Memory 80 Gig Western Digital SE 8MB cache HDD ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB AGP Video Card (not over clocked) SoundBlaster Live 5.1 Sound Card Antec Case with 350-Watt Smart Power Supply and 3 x 80MM Case fans. That should be the most important stuff. If I have forgotten something important please let me know. And sorry about the long post Thanks in advance. AMDSpeed

AMD, Haven't been gaming much in the past few years but i recall most of the games i played required stepping back to 640x480. Give that a try. good luck, wired

Wired, Thanks for the reply, unfortunatly that did not help, same results as before. I did however try running under Windows 98/ME compatibility with the display settings at 256 colors and 640 x 480 resolution. The program didn't start but this time I got the (This program has encountered a problem..... do you wish to sent.....) error message. But I'm still at a lose. Thank you again for your reply. AMDSpeed

Dear AMDSpeed, I had the exact same problems as you've described. I have the same video card and virtually -- pardon the pun -- the same setup, XP, SBLive! 5.1, etc. I tried just about everything you did (with a 10-year-old whining in my ear the whole time.) I even tried adding command prompts to the shortcut. Then I recalled that one of my son's older Windows 95/98 games would feeze up if I had a firewall or anti-virus program running in background. I disabled both (temporarily), set the screen resolution to 1024 x 768 and 16-bit color, and lo-and-behold, the program runs just fine. Who would have guessed? Hope this helps. Sincerely, BestMom (or so my son thinks, now that his game works :)