NickCowan

Right, it's fixed. I eventually went to the graphics card manufacturer (SiS) website, and downloaded the newest driver. It seems that clicking "update driver..." in the properties box really isn't enough.

It did work with 8.1, but I can't get it back to 8.1. 9.0c doesn't seem to work though

Can you not just right click on the driver and "update driver..."? If you then allow it to search the net, it should do the hard work for you... that's what my SiS driver does.

Right, well I've done a great deal of tinkering, and it's still not working. In fact, a message will pop up, now that i've disabled automatic restart on problem, and it says that my graphics card has had a problem and has decided to shut down. This is very annoying, as I haven't done anything to the card, and 'up[censored]' a file shouldn't make a piece of hardware stop working. I have tried several ways of removing DirectX 9 to replace it with 8.1 which worked just fine, and will run anything I'm trying to get working at the moment. It seems that DirectX 9 is incredibly robust, and nothing will shift it. I've tried the uninstall/reinstall thing suggested, and this didn't work. How, my question now is, did a company with Microsoft's track record manage to make something as tough as DirectX 9?

I tried the Formatting/Reinstalling approach, but this didn't work. I don't have a proper SP1 or earlier CD, as I had an integrated Acer/Windows CD, which was giving me grief, so I switched to the SP2 one. This means that DirectX 9.0c is pretty much all I have to play with... unless there's somewhere online that I can find that has older versions of it.

I just intalled SP2 over SP1, in a bid to fix a problem with hal.dll - i.e., my PC doesn't think it's there, and I was advised to try re-installing XP, and that should fix it. Well, it didn't, so I still have the CD in the drive to get it to start up. This is besides the point. My issue is that whenever I try to run anything, and I mean anything with directX, my PC freezes and then shuts down. This includes: games such as Tribes 2, My screensaver will kill it, and even running dxdiag shuts it down... help!