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Hi snobee. Did you read the list of precautions that Lynn made?
I recommend that you check the system settings again and tweak-down the audio and visual hardware acceleration a little bit.
HAL stands for hardware abstraction level and a game today cannot support any hardware directly because simply they are too many.

Direct X 9 and the older versions are HAL, yet completely software techniques can bypass the HAL acceleration and operate on audio and graphics secure standards.
Direct X is a standard HAL that shall not operate perfectly if the hardware manufacturer did not comply 100% with Intel-Micro Soft rules.

Let us say that you wish to run the game at 1024 x 768 and 16 bit colour but you normally operate at 1600 x 1200 x 32, then running the game would certainly demand switching resolution on the fly, right? On the other hand the music loads early to play during the options / quit screen and audio acceleration could crash the game if it was set at full acceleration (which was my only problem).

So if the game is running perfectly with so many players, then the problem is that your system is over rather than under qualified. Having a very advanced system comes with the penalty of having buggy drivers and low compatibility.
To make it compatible, all what you need, is to sacrifice the many new features you have that others do not have.
In the old good days we used to do such things by DOS batch files, to day you may need to save what MS calls hardware configurations and system settings restore.
They both need rebooting your OS while selecting the settings hampered down to be backwards compatible.

Trust me; the game runs perfectly at 20 fps and you shall never need to run it at 200 frames per second because your avatar shall fly not run. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />