Please help, issues with Freelancer and Arx Fatalis

So, I recently got these two games from the second hand self, as I heard good things about 'em.

Problem is, i've installed them, no hitch, but I cannot run them.

For Freelancer, it gives me a friendly error message (Freelancer does not recognize your video card) and asks if I want to continue anyway, I click yes, and the splash screen appears, after 5 secs, I'm dumped back onto the desktop without any error messages or anything.

For Arx Fatalis, all I get is the splash screen for several secs, and am then dumped back onto the desktop like with Freelancer.

All of my other games work fine, including older ones such as Mechwarrior 3 and Starlancer, I'm about to try rolling back to the 66.93 Nvidia drivers and see if that works.

It's worth it to note that a few months ago, I could run my brother's copy of Arx Fatalis fine, now it no longer works either.

And finally, system specs.

CPU: AMD Athalon XP 64 (3000+)
OS: Windows XP Pro SP1
RAM: 768mb
Audio: Realtek AC'97 Audio
GPU: Nvidia Geforce 6600 256mb (78.01 drivers, planning on rolling back to a previous version, as that might be the problem)

Well, thanks for any help you can render.

 

Update:

Rolling back drivers didn't work, suspect it might be something to do with the opening movie playback, no luck fixing it yet though, still would much appreciate any help that y'all could give me.