aal-bundee

Addemdum to my previous post-right after posting I closed down my dial-up isp (or so I thought) and fired up a skirmish before going to work-ACK!!! the anomalies were back!-ah man, better get back on line and remove my post-shut down the game and whoops-hadn't disconnected from the web-shut it completely down, re-started the game and all was well again-just confirms other postings that suggest Nothing running in the background-I will also add that using msconfig and the system startup tab in the tools menu of Spybot (you are using Spybot aren't you?-recommended) I have nothing running in the background or at startup-I have done this for years with 98, 98SE and now XP with no problems-your results my vary.

I had a similar/same problem with my Dell laptop-ATI Mobility Radeon X300 with the latest (8/3/2005) available driver from Dell-conventional wisdom being that it is better to download the driver from the manufacturer's site. My display's native resolution is 1680 x 1050. From the control panel/device manager I rolled the driver back to the original, tweaked all the in game controls up and down to no avail and decided to just being content to play the game on my old desktop. Here I will add that also based on conventional wisdom, I had set my display resolution to 1024 x 768 to match the highest resolution available in the game options menu. After re-installing the latest driver, I restarted and got the message that in effect said that I had set my display resolution lower than the native resolution supported and that my display would not be at it's max clarity-on a hunch I set my desktop to 1680 x 1050 and tried the game one more time-no more artifacting even with all graphic options set to max (in game resolution set at the max of 1024 x 768). Your results may vary but this worked for me.