Buttons, sounds and backgrounds disappear

[Texfire]

Greetings everyone. I hope that you can help me with a problem I am having with SPWAW. Whenever I start the game everything runs fine but an unspecified amount of time later, it varies, all the buttons dissapear along with the sounds. Also the background freezes on whatever screen I am on when this happens. It isn't totally frozen but the hot keys don't all work either. I can't exit and have to Control-Alt-Delete and kill the process.
Here are the particulars of my setup:

P-III 500
512 Mb
Nvidia GeForce 2 MX400 (Xtasy Personal Cinema)
SB Live! Value
Windows 98 Second Edition
DirectX 8.1
SPWAW patched from 5.01 to 7.0

I have verified that the sound card and video drivers are the latest. Also this problem started with a earlier release of DirectX and I upgraded to 8.1 in an attempt to see if that would solve it. I am not sure if my video or sound drivers are the culprit, but since those are the symptoms I am inclined that way. I have version 4.4 which I was able to run before but not now, so something has changed in my setup.

Anyone else encountered this or have any ideas?

Texfire

[tracer]

I had a similar problem and the culprit was DirectX 8.1 ; went back to 8.0a and all worked fine. To remove DirectX you'll need DirectX Buster, get it at www.directxbuster.de

[Texfire]

Thanks for the help but no luck with directx. I have tried DirectX versions 7.0, 8.0 and 8.1 to no avail. I have also tried running SPWAW versions 5.01 with and without the stereo sounds patch, 5.2, 6.1, 7.0 and 7.1beta. All to no avail. In addition to the buttons, sounds and backgrounds most of the hotbuttons do not work.

I am beginning to think that SPWAW doesn't like me. Has anyone else with my sound card and video card had similar problems? I would like to buy some of the Mega Campaigns but if I can't get them to run more that 3-5 turns what's the point? Put me down as frustrated and dissapointed.

Texfire