I was playing the game when it froze up and had to reboot.

When I did and ran dxdiag, I saw that I no longer had Direct 3D.

I messed around with changing the drivers and such and somehow managed to get the AGP function back again, and played this great game for several more hours.

Last night I lost the Direct 3D again and had to change the config to software support in order to get the game to run.

I have seen references to other people having similar problems (config issues, loss of Direct 3D), but not the solutions, any advice/suggestions as to what is happening here?

Is this an issue with the game, or maybe my operating system (XP and dx 8.1)?

Any help would be appreciated.