DirectX or Graphics drivers - games are crashing!

thehomeofDob

As of the last month or two half my games have been crashing within about 20-30 minutes play, though sometimes it's much quicker. The main culprits are Battle for Middle Earth and Sniper Elite, the latter never gives an error message when it crashes, but BfME gives me this.



If I try to restart either game after it crashes I get this error.



After running dxdiag everything shows up fine apart from testing Direct3D

Direct3D 7 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x887602eb (error code)
Direct3D 8 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086a (3D not available)
Direct3D 9 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086a (3D not available)

Now after I reboot - all games will start up properly, and dxdiag shows no faults with anything.

I've resintalled DX9c twice - doesn't change a thing, then I tried uninstalling my graphics drivers, running driver cleaner, then reinstalling the drivers. That sorted the problem for about a day - then back again to crashing every 20 minutes.

I'm totally stumped - I have a feeling this is gonna require a reformat... which I don't wanna do as I've just got everything reinstalled from my last format - and my DVD drive is on the blink so can't use my back up disk.

Oh yeah - here's my system spec.

WindowsXP Home SP2
P4 Northwood 3.06GHz 133FSB
Asus P4S533-X Mobo
1GB DDR 2700
BFG - Nvidia Geforce 6600GT

Everything has the latest drivers.

bus77

There's a fella here who seemed to have the same problem. http://www.experts-exchange.com/Miscellaneous/Games/Q_21354121.html

Look's like a load of messing is required, hope it works out for ya

thehomeofDob

Thanks for the link - but it doesn't help at all.
I should add that I've played BfME on this machine before - through both campaigns and not a single crash.

bus77

edit sry bout that, link worked fine before, try this http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:-sh3lnXcraoJ:www.experts-exchange.com/Miscellaneous/Games/Q_21354121.html+battle+for+middle+earth+directx+problem&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&client=opera

thehomeofDob

Whoops, sorry bout that, I should have been clearer. The link did work, but non of the suggestions helped.
I have the latest Bios for my Mobo
I can't find anything to say that the latest forceware drivers could be a problem
and I have the lastest version of DX9
It could be my virtual memory settings - though I doubt it.