Video Card (or DirectX 3D?) Problem

I've been having this problem with my 256MB Radeon 9250 for a while now and its driving me nuts. I can't get it to work properly with DirectX 3D hardware acceleration. I believe everything else is correct, but as you can tell from the attached pic there is definitely a problem with DirectX.

I've tried repeatedly to reinstall the video card driver and software, and as the manufacturer suggested, not using Microsoft's wizard to automatically install a driver for the card.

The card has worked properly before. The only difference in the system is that I now have a "genuine" copy of Windows XP installed. I had an expired Product Key on the disk that I originally had installed Windows XP on my machine, and as such could never get any updates. I got another disk and used that, made it "genuine" and now I can get all the updates I want but cannot get my video card to work again for the DirectX 3D and therefore can't play most of my games anymore.

I've followed to the letter the knowledge base articles from ATI Support to reinstall my video card. Starting with Knowledge Base article 737-20870: How to Install Your ATI Product, following the prompts for Radeon cards takes you through 737-20561: Removing Old ATI Software and 737-20429: Installing the Display Drivers. I get all the way through all this, through the installation of the ATI Catalyst Software Suite, to the point where it says its done and time to reboot the system.

Here's where each of the times I've went to install the drivers for the video card have shared something in common (that is other than not running DirectX properly) - when it reboots everything appears normal until you get to the point where I put in my password from the front screen and it opens Windows to an entirely black screen and then just sits there doing nothing (I've tried giving it plenty of time to do any processing it might be doing (though soundless which leads me to believe its not doing much of anything) before I do another reboot which takes you into Windows properly).

I ran dxdiag at this point and got the same results as the image you see along with this plea for help. I then installed the remaining ATI software (another 4 pieces for their Multimedia Center) and ran dxdiag again and got the same results. I then went to Microsoft's website to try resolve it by downloading and installing the newest version of DirectX, but still got the same results when I finished.

As you can probably guess by now I'm finding this incredibly frustrating and I'm getting to the end of my rope with this issue. Please let there be some kind soul out there who knows a heck of a lot more than I do about video cards that might be able to help me resolve this problem. Thank you very much for your help!

 

Windows service pak 2 & WGA has been known to cause problems with games.

I removed Service pak 2 from my computer and all the games work again.

However that gaming PC is not exposed to the internet.