Like many previous posters, I had trouble running Freelancer and getting passed the opening screen and I tried most suggestions in these forums with no success. In fact, I got so pissed off trying to get it to work that I filed it away for most of last year and got on with other games. However, In desperation I phoned Microsoft games and was told that Freelancer will not run on the latest graphics drivers for my card which is a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 128mb 8X and that I should load an archive driver ( I chose 41.09 ) and reduce resolution to 800 x 600 which worked and I have no trouble playing the game. What angers me is that the Microsoft support site has no mention of this whatsoever and in fact tells you to ensure you have the latest drivers installed with the result that many of us have wasted a lot of time and effort to resolve this problem of crashing with certain video cards. I just thought I would get this off my chest in case there are newcomers out there having the same problems.