Installing DirectX in Win2000

For the last couple of weeks I've not been able to update my program. First thing was I bought a bluetooth mouse that had a faulty adapter. When is the worst time to plug in a faulty adapter? When windows is loading, that way it can cause a surge and ultimately switch the PC off when Windows is loading; causing data to not be loaded os saved properly and general corruption of important Windows files. That is what happened to me. Despite trying, there was no way to restore my Windows 2000. So I had the much practiced but awkward task of reinstalling windows and all my software and of course trying to recover saved passwords and emails. Installing windows is no fun, ith al those F's , C's , U's and K's !!

This time however I installed WindowsXP since it has restore points, I thought it might be helpful! I installed Offic2003 more than once and it still refuses to load up Access, however Word and everything else loads fine though! Yesterday I spent a long time installing Visual Studio. I must have installed it 4 or so times with various options, but it still complained that the debugger wasn't installed. Only after installing SP1 did it work properly and I could finally run a solution without any problems.

I then tried to run my ES Game which seemed to run ok, it just wasn't able to create the Direct3d device? I had the same problem in Windows XP as well. Perhaps it my program I thought, so I ran some other DX programs, all worked fine. I then ran programs that used Managed DX and they too had problems. So it has got to be the managed DX that messing it up somewhere.
I have no idea why though. I've tried installing the Directx9c user runtime -which downloads what it requires from the web, the 9c manged redistributable and the oct 9c redist, the oct20005 sdk - which doesn't run in Win2k. All with no joy, I'm not sure what I had isntalled last time that allowed it to work. I've just read that from Feb 2005, Win2k is no longer a supported platform for DirectX development (http://www.toymaker.info/Games/html/directx_9_0c.html). So i'm downloading the Dec2004 sdk (They seem to release sdk updates every two months), if that doesn't solve my problems I'll have to try and get it to work in WinXP. I can't believe how much trouble I'm having to get this working. I just hope no end-user has to go through this, as I'm sure they would just not bother, give up and move on to the next game.


The Dec2004 sdk solved nothing. I've given up on Win2k since its no longer supported it's not worth my efforts or time. I installed the enhanced asus video driver for my nvidia Geforce 4 card, no help there. I installed the via 4 in 1 driver (it has AGP 8x driver) that didn't help.

I then ran the Windows Update and installed the Service pack 1 for .Net framework 1.1 and the service pack 3 for framework ver1.0, restarted windowsXP and what do you know, it started to work. So now my game runs and I can reume development.

Although I can't be bothered today, so I might just try making a start on documenting what I've done.