Never a problem -- now Dom2 crashes to desktop

[tinkthank]

Argh, I've never had a problem before
Today I tried hosting a small MP game on my standard win98 machine, and dom2 sort of hung during the hosting process; after 10 mins or so (about 15-30 seconds would have been normal) I had to reboot. A few tries, but no luck: once launching the .exe, it crashed to desktop.
So I just reinstalled it, first uninstalling.
Launched, looked ok. So I quit, and patched.
Relaunched, it crashed to desktop. Reboot, and it didnt launch at all, sort of hung in a black screen, and when I used the task manager to finally shut it down, my graphics were kinds of screwy (still stuck on really low).
Reboot, it crashes to desktop.
Does anyone know what this is and what I can do? I am a computer idiot, so if you could help me out in English, that would be great.
thanks much

[Chazar]

Umh, I had a similar problem once with Win98SE when hosting:

The source of the problem was a personal firewall, which produced a pop-up asking me whether I want to allow Dom2.exe to act as a server or not (which is should if you want to host a game). This pop-up blocked the game from continuing until it got a response (thus producing a continious black-screen). However, I could not notice the pop-up window since it was surpressed by Dom2 running in Full-screen mode and hence I did not respond...

...but reconsidering, that would not produce any crashes, so what I have written above is totally unrelated to your problem...

[PDF]

Try to check if some Dom16882 folder exists in your Windows/Temp directory, if yes delete it, then Dom2 should be fine
Else I'm not that good at divination !

[tinkthank]

PDF, thanks a lot, that helps -- I got it to run once!!!!
I cannot get it to run in windowed mode, however. (When I click "preferences", fullscreen off, it blanks out on me, and I have to task-manager it away.
Do I have a virus or something? I cant figure it out. Norton sez I dont.
Argh, I really dont understand this.
Thanks for your help.

[tinkthank]

PS. Once I have to task-manager it away once, it will not start again. I have to reboot and reinstall.

[PDF]

Tinkthank
Re windowed mode : I divine you have a ATI card , so instead trying to go through "preferences" just edit your Dom2 shortcut and put a -w flag in the command line.
(I myself experienced grahics problem when going into/out of windowed mode ..)

Re crash after taskman : just delete the dom16882 folder each time you crash it

Hope it helps

[Alneyan]

Hitting the F12 key (if it is the one that results in the windowed mode) also seems to work to activate it. At least, it does for me and my ATI card. It tends to take quite some time to work, but it should eventually work.