Several new games that I recently downloaded crash after a few intro screens and never make it to the menu. I have a Dell XPS with Win 7 - 64 bit. No major changes recently. Happens using any browser. No problems till about a week ago. I have tried new drivers and updates for everything I can think of including turning off all antivirus. Games are generally from the casual genre and games I already had seem to work fine. Also tried deleting and downloading again.

Non-working games include:
Combat Wings : Battle of Britain
A Girl in the City
Lost Lagoon 2
Exorcist 2

A similar game "Insider Tales" worked.

Any else with this problem or ideas please????

The most logical place to start would be to install direct x from the games own page.

The reason for this is it can at times install older files that are needed as well as newer files.

When you say you have updated everthing i presume you mean you have tried the above step?

If you have updated direct x i presume you are using updated drivers for your graphics card,mother board and sound card?

Have you checked the quaranteen folder of your virus scanner to make 100% sure your security is not blocking the game.Some virus scanners when disabled can still leave traces running and can block games as a result.

It might also pay to check for spyware with a stand alone spyware scanner as virus scanners tend not to be as good at picking up spyware.A tool i use for this is advanced system care which has a free version available from http://www.iobit.com It also checks for other things too.Cleans history and junk files,optimises some system settings,checks for invalid reg entries etc.

If none of the above helps

Do you get a windows error log logged with more specific info.To check goto start then right click computer and choose manage.In the window that loads expand event viewer,winodws logs and choose application.Providing you have tried to launch the game right before starting this process the error generated should be the 1 right at the top of the list. double click the error.choose the details tab of the window that loads.expand both system and event data then copy and paste the details here please.

Thanks for the suggestions. I had already tried all the updates but looking in the event viewer helped me track down some dll's that were causing the problem. They were from some obscure options in Kapersky anti-virus that didn't go away when the protection was disabled. I had to stop them from loading to get a fix.

What were the Kaspersky settings? I'm also getting errors on some (not all) games that seem to be resulting from a ntdll.dll problem, despite having the dll file where it should be. I'm running Kaspersky pure and wondering if that is the problem. My drivers are all up to date. I appear to have all the dx9 stuff. I have also ownloaded this from the game page but am a little unsure as to where to extract the files to. Any help will be greatly appreciated!