Halo: Combat Evolved: The game unexpectedly quits before the intro movie or you receive the “A problem occurred initializing Direct3D” error message

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SYMPTOMS

Microsoft has identified a potential incompatibility between Microsoft Halo: Combat Evolved and Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) on high-end video cards with 256 megabytes (MB) of onboard RAM. This incompatibility may cause Halo: Combat Evolved to unexpectedly quit immediately after you start the program, but before the logo movies play. Computers that can continue beyond this point are unaffected by this problem and will not benefit from this fix.

Additionally, you may receive the following error message after Halo: Combat Evolved quits:

A problem occurred initializing Direct3D.
Hardware acceleration maybe disabled, please run DXDIAG

RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, download and install the Halo for Windows v1.05 Hotfix or a later version. To do this, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://www.microsoft.com/games/halo/downloads.aspx (http://www.microsoft.com/games/halo/downloads.aspx)