I bought my gaming machine with 64 bit Vista Home Premium in March and the Dark Magic DVD came with the machine. I installed with no problem and actually played the game. I left it alone for about 7 months and now when I try to start it, i get the infamous Microsoft message that mm.exe has quit working. The location of the problem is shaderapidx9.dll. I changed my UAC to off since that sometime causes the Microsoft message. I've looked at the numerous messages on this site and made sure that everything on my machine was up to date. I even tried installing with all the extras turned off including Norton Anti-virus. I added the -dxlevel90 extension to the shortcut target. I have plenty of memory, diskspace (not fragmented),other horsepower and plenty of virtual memory but it won't run. Maybe someone can enlighten me on what the above .dll file does and how to fix the problem. Thanks- bob

Hello odmuzik

[SOLUTION] shaderapidx9.dll related crashes on Vista.
I hope that helps.

Thanks. I'll look into it tomorrow and post the results.

odmuzik

I did not have a WMI problem. The only thing it says is that it "Failed to initialize all required WMI classes- WIN32_Processor:<null>: no such interface. WIN32_WMISetting: Successful Security Information: Successful Win32_Operating System: ,null> no such interface supported" That's because it's a 64 bit system. Tried editing cmd.exe and all it gave me was the a syntax. No reference to NT. While I was looking at the WMI in the control panel, I went to Services and saw a complete list of services. Clicking on the Windows Management Instrumentation brought up the description and also the ability to restart WMI. I did that and now the fault on starting Dark Magic is "ntdll.dll". It's not even on my computer. Any other suggestions?

ntdll.dll is not on your computer? It should be.

Make sure you have installed Service Pack 1.

I uninstalled the game before I got your message. I was using the explorer search function for the file and just specifying the c: drive. Apparently, it doesn't look in every folder and couldn't find the .dll file in question. Having the game installed caused all kinds of problems (most I can't remember now) so I just gave up on it. Before I uninstalled, I did the refresh of the WMI and the nt...l file message no longer came up.

I did an advanced search and found numerous copies of the ntdll.dll file. I reinstalled DM and now when I try to start it, I can an error message that it "can't write license data". Any idea what would cause that?

Make sure you have admin rights on your computer. And you don't need to register the game, if that was what you attempted/enabled?

When I installed the game (for the umpteenth time), I told it to never register it because it had been registered before. I got this error message when I tried to start from the desktop shotcut. It tells me to contact support. After I logged onto the web, I registered it again but still get the same error message. One thing it never asked for during the install is the key code. Is that normal. I can't recall.

I got thinking about the administration rights and tried changing them to no avail (still wouldn't work). I then uninstalled and then reinstalled using my name instead of "microsoft" as the owner even though every one who uses my computer has the right to use this program. Once installation was complete, the "can't write license data" went away and now I'm back to "mm.exe" quit working again. I don't understand this. This program ran the very first time I installed it.

News Flash! I went back and tried again to edit cmd.exe as discussed in a previous post in this thread. I had done this before but all it did was whine about symantecs and wouldn't work. This time,it worked and now I can run DM. Go figure. Thanks for all the help. Bob

Glad it finally worked! Enjoy the game.