Veritech VF-11

do you hear all the audio stuff ok when the starts up and during opening credits before game starts to and such? because i had a similar problem with the game crashing really quickly or sometimes even before attempting to load. i also have an XP system. since i knew i ought to be hearing some kind of sound at some point throughout this process, i opened Device Manager to find what i could find. here's the weird part... same as you, i had all the audio, video, multimedia, etc. drivers installed and up to date and nothing in Dev. Man indicated anything wrong with any of those; however, 2 big yellow questions marks (in other words two devices missing their driver files) next to SM BUS controller and Mass Storage Device. so, since i already know that uninstalling either of them is pointless because Windows ALWAYS 'finds new hardware' and tries reinstall them at system start-up everytime - and everytime, can't find the driver files... i decided to not unistall but disable them from this harware profile. and poof! game works... well sort-of. at this very moment i'm stuck at the character appearance/stats screen and i'm here to see if i it's 'cause i don't know what keyboard controls to use or because it's actually stuck. anyway... point is, take a look into your Device Manager and check to make sure that there aren't ANY devices with big yellow question marks next to them amd if there are, try double clicking them and selecting the Disable Device option on the properties sheet. even if the device seems totally unrelated to anything the game needs to run on, if it's installed but not working due to missing files, it could be tying up your systems resources, I/O's, IRQ's, or some other system settings thing that your media control devices rely upon to operate correctly. make sense? anyway, don't know if that's any kind of help to anyone other than me as errorswith games are almost always unique to each machine/system, but maybe it'll get in the direction you need to go to stumble upon the solution? who knows...