I downloaded and installed new drivers for my soundcard & vid card (nvidia geforce 6600GT) and everything loaded and seems to work fine. I start the game and the opening movie plays (sounds and looks fine), but then the whole system shuts down and I have to reboot. It never hangs in the same place twice. I thought I had it with the new vid driver (ver 78.01), the movie went alot further than it had before, but just as I began congratulating myself, it crashed again. I'm thinking bad CD now, no obvious scratches, but I'm out of ideas HELP!

Try rolling back a version to 77.77. Other people have had problems with 78.01.

And install NVIDIA drivers as detailed in Myst V: Installing Video Drivers With Win XP, one of the stickied topics at the top of this Forum.

well that didnt work... I'll try the clean boot install.. and then it's back to the store to dump this thing. I've wasted the weekend trying to get it to work. Dowloading drivers with a crappy dialup connection is not alot of fun.