Unreal 2, Directx 9, and Win98SE crashes

Problem:

Unreal 2 will launch the first time, but will crash and freeze when launched a second time if Directx 9.0b is installed on my computers. (No problems at all with Directx 8.1). If I launch other programs (i.e. browsers, other games, etc.) after the first launch of Unreal 2 without restarting, the problem extends into those programs also. Upon restarting, every program will launch once and crash/freeze on the second launch, just as Unreal 2 did.

This is only on my Windows 98 SE machines, my Windows XP machine with a Geforce 2 PCI video card does not have this problem.

After extensive clean installs, I also found that if you launch Unreal 2 once and then restart before launching other progams, they are NOT affected.

Unreal Tournament 2003 is not affected by installing Directx 9.0b unless I launch Unreal 2, so there is definitely something going on between Unreal 2 and Directx 9.0b.

I tested on both AMD XP and Intel Pentium machines, as well as with Geforce FX 5600 and Geforce4 video cards.

After reading many other forums, I find other people having the same sort of problems with other games after installing Directx9 (which cannot be uninstalled). There seems to be no other common factor other than Directx9. I have read of ATI and NVidia cards, Windows 98, 2000 and XP, and AMD and Intel.

Solution:

Clean install and only load Directx 8.1.

Has anyone had this same problem with Unreal 2 and Directx9.0b