Need for Speed Underground won't run after Service Pack 2 ..

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.games.discussion,microsoft.public.games (More info?)

Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced this and possibly knows how
to deal with it. After installing Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, this
game, Need for Speed Underground, is essentially non-functional. Upon
running the game, I first get the small splash screen and the game
appears to be loading normally. However, at the load screen before the
intro videos, it slows to a crawl. The intro videos run extremely
choppy. The one time I managed to skip past the intro videos, I also
found that the menus ran extremely slow as well. Pressing Alt+F4 will
close the game and get me back to the desktop.

I know that Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 is on the list of broken
programs for Service Pack 2, but there is no mention of Underground. I
got a Windows firewall notice upon running the game for the first time
and chose to unblock the program, but I don't think my problems are
network related anyway. For a GPU I have an nVidia GeForce FX 5700 with
the latest Forceware drivers, version 61.77, which support DirectX 9.0c.
The game is patched with the latest update from EA. Any ideas,
similar experiences, or fixes, I'd love to hear about.

Thanks,

--
And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
-Confucius

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