Black screen/Crash to desktop on startup

Hello there. I recently installed and managed to play Arcanum for two days. Today, however, Arcanum simply refuses to start and get anywhere for me. I can't think of anything relevant that I've changed. Here's what happens:

*I run Arcanum.exe or Arcanum.exe -fullscreen or Arcanum.exe -no3d
*A black window comes up very briefly
*I am returned to the desktop without any error

I am completely stumped as to the cause of this--everything worked fine yesterday. So far I have tried the following:

*Reinstalling + 1.0.7.4 patch
*Reinstalling + 1.0.7.4 patch + No-CD patch
*Reinstalling + 1.0.7.4 patch + UAP080510

Before you ask, yes, I am running from CD images (.mdf + daemon). Before I went off to college I ripped all my old games to an external hard-drive, to avoid risking the CDs themselves. I have the CDs, they're just on the other side of the country
I'm guessing running from images is the issue? I don't understand though why it worked before but doesn't now.

The issue doesn't seem unique to me, as I have found other people describing something similar, but from running Arcanum under Windows emulation within Linux (which I am not doing).

Additionally, does anyone know of any conflicts between Arcanum and the Litestep shell? I have previously run them together without issue, and tried today running Arcanum from the command line with no shell loaded at all with no result.

 

I had similar problems running the game under vista, using Alcohol myself to host my game images. The solution for me was to put the Win2000 mode on and run the exe as admin.

Housedog

 

Thanks for the response!
I am unfortunately using XP on an account with administrator privileges. I tried running the exe in Windows 2000 compatibility mode but to no avail.

 

And the right resolution? I don't think Arcanum runs above 800x600. But you shouldn't have to manually set that should you? Try anyway, though. It might help. 800x600 with 16 bit color.

 

What're your system specs? Also, what do you know technologically? Do you know how to check DxDiag for errors?

 

After toying around for awhile, on a whim I decided to enable the administrator account (it is disabled except for safe mode by default) and managed to run Arcanum.
It doesn't run on a user account with administrator privileges, or using the 'run as user' option on a shortcut.
So, it works, but now I'm trying to narrow down specifically what it is that prevents Arcanum from running.

Specs, by the way, although they're probably irrelevant now:

AMD Turion 64 Mobile MT-40 @ 1.58GHz
1GB RAM
Creative SB Audigy 2 (Notebook)
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600, 256MB
- Omega 7.12 drivers modified to work on notebooks
Windows XP Media Center Edition

If I have any more luck narrowing down what the issue was, I will post again, for the sake of those forlorn google-searchers.

 

I see two possible causes:

Firstly, I would guess, boldly enough, that you're suffering from a user's rights issue. I don't know exactly what/where, but that would be my guess. It's also possible that Media Center's "media-oriented" features conflict with Arcanum.