seirous answer:
Vista, since day one(ish), has been giving random problems with D2, some say it works, some say it doesnt, some say it works SOMETIMES, i havnt seen a true answer to anything besides "wait a week and reinstall"
my best suggestion would be to setup a dual boot for windows XP though, i suggest that to everyone tha thas vista
After reading this thread, I have came to this conclusion:
First of all guys, this is help this guy with his problem with the
resources he has.
NOT BASH VISTA BECAUSE IT SUCKS TO MAKE HIM FEEL BAD thread. Cheeze, Dragn, and Wing seem to be the only ones who have some finite advice here. If I was that kid and I read that advice, I would think of you all as *no offense* dorks and not post here.
In order for him to install XP properly, he would need to get XP before it goes off the shelves. He can't download it to a CD because it may not be registered as authentic. That would be spending more time and resources than he would normally spend to fix a minor problem. And what if he uninstalls Vista, and XP doesnt work? I was wondering did half of you think about that before you posted, or let alone actually install and use the OS?
Second, Blizzard Tech Support is decent. But pretty unreliable. They are good for basic problems, but I ask them for more advanced help, and they dont give me what I want.
I am running Vista Premium at this house, and all my D2 mods and vanilla D2 are running at optimal parameters. The problem with Vista is it has Dx9, but the DLLs for it are in a different package than the one Diablo II wants. Every single game I own runs on Vista properly even, the only con is I only have 1 GB of free RAM out of 2.
First, go to Microsoft's website and download
DirectX End User Runtime, and install that. This will give you the updated APIs for Dx9 and Dx10. If you are running 64bit Windows, then I don't know what to say. Because 64 Bits cannot install drivers as of yet.
I found this to be a solution since my friend had problems installing Age of Empires IV on his Vista machine. He was missing dx9_32.dll, so he downloaded the End User Runtime. It ended up working and installing properly. This was the first thing I did when I got this PC operational.