I recently bought an Absolute sound card. It sounded good, and the specs were quite high. It cost around £50. I also upgraded my memory from 128mb to 192mb (this seemed to work ok on windows SE, but i dont know if the speeds of the two DIMMs are the same) I also bought a GeForce 2 MX 32MB Graphics card. Now my system is quite good, I have a Celeron 700Mhz CPU, plenty of nice clean HD space etc. However games such as Thief, Half-Life, Descent 3 and Heretic II will all install ok, then they will either freeze after the initial video sequence after the game loads, or report VMX Fatal exception errors. What does this mean ? I have other games which require higher specs, which run great, why cant I run these games. ( my friends with systems supposedly lesser than mine can run these games, however poorly!) Could it be my monitor, as it is rubbish( my original was stolen, and Im now using a 1990 or something piece of junk, which is probably more used to 2mb graphics cards. (although my windows resolution is set at 800x600 at 32bit colors and runs okay. PLEASE HELP

Try to run the games at 16bit color. Try to upgrade to the newest version of DirectX (available at the Microsoft website). If that doesn't resolve the problems, see if the games in question require any type of OpenGL drivers. If so, download and install those as well. I doubt the monitor has anything to do with the games not functioning unless they expect a certain refresh rate which is incompatible with your monitor. Also try to update your video card drivers.

Your problem lies in the DirectX adapter of your machine. You need to update the dirver for DirectX at the Microsoft site. Also, you need to make sure that your old on-board video is diabled. If you are running the Intel chip-set, there is known issue with THIEF that cause "Fatal Errors" and result in your computer crashing. Go to the Intel site an load the up-date for the chip-set for your computer, (I'm guessing you have the chip set 810e) and if so it needs to be updated bad. This should resolve the conflict in the video as well as fix the DirectX problem. I had the same problem. Took me two weeks to figure it out.