🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello all.  Thanks for the suggestions.  They were some good food
for thought.  I played two games of C&C generals last night _without_
any problems.  

- I removed Directx 9.0b.  This meaned reinstalling windows again.
  Microsoft has apparently thought it neccesary to "tie" directx 9
  "into" the operating system. 

- Installed Directx 8.1 from the generals CD

- Installed my *OLD* video drivers for my radeon 9000 sapphire pro card.
  The newest drivers from the ATI website only use dx9.0. 

- Installed generals.  Things worked for two games without locking up.


So the question is, why does it work now?  A couple things that may be
the problem.  

1) I always install "bundled" software (like video drivers), with the "custom" 
   option.  This way, I can always say "No" to all the extra fluff that these
   programs want to install.  C'mon guys, just install the video drivers.  I do  
   not want to install Acrobat reader, or IE6.  

   I was sick of installing software all weekend and just hit the "express"
   install button - it installed all the eye-candy and desktop clicky things
   at startup, but something I hadn't noticed before is that the extra settings
   for openGL, etc now showed up in the desktop settings dialog box.  Interesting.

2) Using the updated video drivers from the ATI website required that I install
    Directx 9.  The package I grabbed from download.com was Directx 9b, 
    suggesting beta software I suppose.

3) I also noticed, the 1280x960 video option is not an option in the Generals
    video mode option pulldown.  Perhaps the 9000 pro card does not run well
    with this game at that resolution.

So, in short, with a lot of head scratching and supposing, I think all the problems
I was having were directly related to the video drivers and directX.  This includes
the unexplicable network play lockups (while offline skirmishes worked fine).
It all magically works now.

Thanks for all the replies.
bl8n8r