My friend was having this problem too. Her situation was that she bought it in 2005, installed it and it ran fine. Well one day, after running the "oh-so-helpful" Windows updates that seem to always make everything worse, the game stopped loading and delivered the infamous DirectX 9.0c message that so many people are familiar with now. I tried up[censored] DirectX but no luck. Then it dawned on me; she said it used to work fine. Well, if it worked once it will work again. I went to Control Panel, System, Device Manager, and located her graphics card under all the options. I went to the device drivers and clicked "Roll Back Driver". I rolled it back from 2005 to 2001 and the game works perfectly now. I'm not sure if having an old Video Card driver will affect anything else down the road but for now, the main mission was accomplished, which was to get the Sims 2 up and running. I promised her I would get it working somehow and I did. Hope this helps somebody. Good Luck!
