Well its been happening to me since one of the updates forgot which one pretty sure since .95 its been doing this. anyways ive just dealt with it because i didnt play as often as i used to but it will alow me to start and play the game fine for however long it likes until im done and quit the game. now the next time i try to start it up it gives me an error saying "make sure you have directx 8.1c or higher installed" and no matter how many times i try it does this. the only fix ive been doing it reinstalling the game every time i wanna play again but its finally getting old and i wanna know if there are at least some other trick to fixing this other than reinstalling every time

Install latest directX (9.0c or something).

oh its installed. all 50 or so my other games work just fine, but for some reason SHW does this

This is an issue I use to run across quite a lot when running vista or windows 7, I forget what the exact solution was so do the following:

- Turn off windows firewall
- Delete options.ini in your my documents zero hour folder

If you find that there isn't an options.ini then that is probably the problem (the new operating systems sometimes cause trouble when the game attempts to create the file), manually make one by creating a new notepad document and pasting in the following:



Be sure to save as options.ini.

now that the forums r back up i can post my adventures with this. anyways i tried that and im still getting the error and options.ini was there to begin with as im running xp. dont rly know what to do other than reinstall evrytime. this computer saddens me with its retardedness D:

A friend of mine had this issue when trying to play the game on an external monitor. It could be that DirectX (or some nuance with how Generals is using it) is having trouble creating the graphics window and setting the resolution. Try a different monitor setup/screen resolution and see if that fixes it.