Ok, so I had a whole mess of problems lately with my video card. It was causing me to get BSOD so I went out and got a new one. The old card was a Radeon 9800 Pro, the new one is a Radeon HD 2400.

Now I was kinda dumb when I was trying to figure out what my original problem was and deleted DirectX from my system (I have XP btw). That caused a whole new nightmare trying to reinstall it, which I won't get into here - suffice it to say that I tried installing it every which way and got errors every time. Someone finally suggested the very simple solution to use a system restore and it actually seems to have worked. Dxdiag confirms that I have 9.0c installed again.

However, when I try to play Warcraft 3 now the screen flashes black a few times as it loads the game, then I get that awful error message saying "Warcraft 3 could not initialize DirectX." The drivers for my new vid card are properly installed. So I hopped back to Dxdiag and ran some tests. DirectDraw works fine, but Direct3D utterly fails. Each screen test results in the error "Direct3D test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device)." I don't know what to do now. Does my new video card have incompatibility issues, or is there just a problem with DirectX?

I should also mention that under files Dxdiag has these notes:

-The file directx.cpl is an old version, which could cause problems.
-Several files (d3dx8d.dll, d3dx9d.dll, d3d9d.dll) are debug versions, which will run slower than the retail version.
-You should reinstall DirectX to get the latest version.

I've tried to update DirectX with the latest 9.0c package and these messages are still there. I don't think it's related to the problem, but at this point I'm pretty lost.

There's only one program I know of that can remove DirectX from Windows XP... XPLite.
Just reformat and reinstall. Given today's HDD and memory capacity and how affordable they are, there is NO reason whatsoever to go removing essential components like that.
I used to be an nLite fanatic. Now I don't even use it anymore. I'm actually playing around with Linux distros like Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9.

If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

Yeah, I already know it was a bad idea to do it. But as for this particular problem, I worked it out. The drivers that come with this series of vid card are faulty and aren't compatible with Direct3D. I downloaded a hotfix and it works fine now.

Oh, I see. You thought perhaps your DX was corrupt so you tried to remove and reinstall it and that's when you encountered a big problem.
I misjudged your intentions. I apologize.


Cheers,
Jeremy