Actually, I can emulate this behaviour with 100% accuracy.
If I start Unreal Tournament and exit after the cut scene, AH will do exactly that.
I start it and sometimes I see the flash of the white screen, sometimes I don't, but it immediately dumps back to the desktop.
System Config:
550 Mhz PIII
128MB SD100 ram
Super Micro P6SBA M/B
Addtron DEC based 10/100 Ethernet card
Adaptec AHA-2740AU SCSI adapter
SB AWE64 Sound card
ATI Rage 128 xpert 99 Video card (AGP)
Seagate Barracuda SCSI disk
Toshiba 40X SCSI CDROM
Sony 200ES 17" monitor
MS Intellimouse
MS Sidewinder Pro Stick
Windows 98SE (full install)
All MS patches to 98SE installed
IE 5.01 with all updates
ATI 4.11.6263 video driver
MS Sidewinder driver version 3.02
Standard builtin 98 drive for Intellimouse
DX 7.0a
My only cure is to reboot after starting almost any other DX game before I can launch AH.
As a side note, if I run other DX based games back to back, I usually see some other bizarre problems with games.
As a result, whenever I play a DX based game, I reboot after exiting that game, before starting another.
After looking at this for some time, I can offer some speculation to this anomaly.
It appears there is a problem with the way MS caches information in memory.
Once exiting a DX based game, and trying to start another, MS appears to opt to immediately load the next game to swap space, instead of unloading the previous game from memory, which suggests some type of memory leak in the DX drivers, or VM drivers.
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Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.netskuzzy@applink.net
