I'm trying to get Thief: Gold to run on XP. After forcing it to install (it thinks XP is NT with no DirectX) and installing the video codecs to show the awesome cutscenes and loadmovies, and then setting the affinity to only use one CPU (it doesn't like 2) it still locks up.

The folks at the Thief forums say that it just won't run on Nvidia cards with drivers 9x.xx and that it will only work on 8x.xx and earlier.

My question for you is this: Is there an easy way to change drivers without everything else getting all crapped up?

Well, problem solved. It will sound like total bull****, but by inserting an underscore into the name of the exe, it worked. thief_.exe

I haven't the slightest idea how that could be possible.

That's weird. Congrats!

Could be a dev thing they included to skip some compatibility checks.

For future reference:
- Windows compatibility mode might have helped... I would have tried 98 since it doesn't seem to like NT based systems.
- I've played Thief Gold with no problems so the above is probably what I used though I don't recall having any problems.
- nVidia's driver installers will automatically help you downgrade. They detect a newer driver and offer to uninstall it for you. Then when you reboot the older driver installer will run again automatically.
- There are plenty of tools to remove all driver traces if something screws up, so you can then reinstall the drivers easy.

I recently tried Deus Ex... couldn't get it to work right. I had a constant HIGH fps, but the game would suddenly ultra slow down with the high fps or go light speed. I got it working to the point where the game was going at slower than normal speed with high fps, but the audio was terribly messed up and all the dialouges would cut out before they were finished.

I was just playing Deus Ex, I have had no problems with it on XP. Doesn't matter if I use the DX or OpenGL engines. My dad plays it frequently on HIS XP machine and has no problems either.