Won't run on HP Pavilion ze4600 laptop :-(

[x-nert]

Darwinia Demo 2 runs just fine -- if a bit slowly, on my machine -- but "real" Darwinia won't run. I get a black screen, then a few seconds later up pops the Windows XP dialog, "Darwinia needs to close," etc., offering me the option of sending an error report to Microsoft. Clicking "Don't Send" leaves the black screen up, in a non-refreshing state such that other windows popped up IN FRONT OF it, leave ghost images behind when closed or moved. At that point, the Task Manager shows darwinia.exe running and consuming between 50 and 95 percent of the CPU, for as long as I care to wait before manually deleting the process.

Applying the 1.42 patch didn't help (if anything, it has made the situation WORSE, because I seem to recall getting a Blackbox.txt file with the 1.0 darwinia.exe, but do NOT get a Blackbox.txt file with the 1.42 darwinia.exe). Updating the graphics driver does not help. Updating DirectX does not help, in fact seems to introduce a DxDiag test-failure mode I haven't seen in the past (see below). Fiddling with the RenderLandscapeMode parameter does not help, nor does fiddling with the BootLoader and Startmap parameters to bypass the world map, nor does using 3DAnalyzer to force 32x32 textures. The VERY MOST I've been able to achieve is to get between 2 and 5 seconds of music to play, while the black screen is up, before the "... needs to close" dialog appears; in the original failure mode there was no music. (The only thing I have NOT yet done, is to update my sound driver. I will do that, if I can, just for the sake of completeness... but I'm skeptical that sound drivers could totally suppress game operation. Maybe I'm wrong...)

Since updating DirectX today, to 9.0c, DxDiag exhibits a strange misbehavior that is new to me: all Direct3D tests abort themselves, with messages claiming that I canceled them by pressing a key -- which I did NOT. There is of course nothing in the DxDiag help text to suggest a course of action should a test produce any result other than success.

Information from DxDiag:

System Info:
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, build 2600)
Processor: mobile AMD Athlon(tm) XP2500+, MMX, 3DNow, ~1.9GHz
Memory: 446 Mb RAM
DirectX Version: 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

Display:
Chip Type: U1 AGP (0x4336)
Approx. Total Memory: 64.0 MB

Drivers:
Main Driver: ati2dvag.dll
Version: 6.14.0010.6436 (English)
Date: 5/15/2004 19:29:34

Hope someone can shed some light on this.