Computer freeze halfway through the game

[DKBK]

Hi.

I'm new here but I hope some of you can help me out here.

Ok here's how it goes. I installed the game about two months ago. Started playing, everything went great except for a slight sound garbage but I could live with that. I played all the way to the sandtraps chapter without a single crash. But cat 5.2 were released and I updated from cat 4.12 to 5.2 And now the game started crashing on a very regular basis. VPU rcover would spring up into action at leats every 5 minutes if it didn't totally lock up the system.

So I figured it was time to reformat my computer since it had been a while anyway. So I got around to it yesterday and I reinstalled everything from scratch including cat 5.2 again. But it still crashes as often as before.

So I decided to rollback to caT 4.11 just to be safe. Still the same problem.

I read here that some people recommend moving the sound card (Sb live 5.1) but I doubt that would change anything since it was woring fine. Same thing for fastwrites.

If anyone has any idea here it would be really appreciated because this is starting to piss me off.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

 

[DKBK]

Here's some more info about my system if it can help.

I have an athlon 2600+ with a gig of ram and an nforce 2 board. And I just realized I didn't even mention my video card. I have a radeon 9600 pro 128meg. I'm using xp pro SP2. My game is also fully updated.

Here's a few more things I tried so far which didn't work : I disabled AGP fast write, I tested it in windowed mode and I played around with the settings in-game to no avail (I'm currently at 2x AA and 8x aniso). Changing the resolution between 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 didn't help either.

I've also tested my ram and it reported no errors.

Now I'm really running out of ideas and I,m starting to think maybe my video card started malfunctioning at the same time I changed drivers even though that seems highly unlikely. Would anyone know of an utility that could test a radeon 9600 pro and/or video ram to see if my video card really has an issue or not ?

Any help with this would be appreciated.