XP SP3 issue

I have recently purchased and installed GalCiv II GOTY edition on my system. System specs: Athlon dual core 64 bit processor, NVIDIA 8600 GT Video Board, 3 Gig RAM, system controlled paging file (over 2G), all essential drivers updated (verified at mfr web sites), running Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (w/latest updates to DirectX 9.0c). I have encountered the issue of the game starting switching to a large black square in the upper right hand corner of the screen and progressing no further after several minutes. The problem persisted after upgrading to the last version of Dread Lords. I have even run the optimizer from AMD. My plans include ordering Dark Avatar and Twilight of the Arnor from the online store. My questions are:

1) Is this a known issue and should I run the hotfix (which Microsoft Knowledge Base shows as SP2 only)?

2) Will the later ones run if this one doesn't? (I ask this because I have seen the full game running on a Dual Core laptop running Vista with less hardware horsepower than my desktop).

Any help would be appreciated.

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If it's not crashing, check your resolution in your prefs.ini in the appropriate folder in My Documents\My Games (GalCiv2/GC2DarkAvatar/GC2TwilightArnor).

If that doesn't work, or you get a new error, post up your debug.err found in the same directory. In older versions of DL it was located alongside the executable and launcher, but in more recent versions it can be found in My Games as well.

I assume you're referring to Microsoft's "fix" for AMD dual cores-it's probably a good idea to install that in addition to AMD's optimizer. I'm not sure why it would say SP2 only, but it's probably just a minimum requirement and hasn't been updated to reflect SP3's existence. (After all, it would make no sense to download it to install in SP3 on a system without an AMD CPU, or a multicore one at that, and it would make even less sense to lock out those who install SP3 from installing it in the first place.)

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Thanks. Never would have thought about checking resolution in the .ini file.

BTW, the SP3 installer apparently checks for fixes that came out between SP2 and SP3 and installs the necessary ones. KB lists the hotfix as an update for XP SP2. It seems to be part of the reason the SP3 install lists a variable size for SP3.

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