in your mother board bios, is your AGP set to 1x 2x or 4x?
i would get lockups a few seconds into playing AH when i was in 4x. So i changed to 2x and everythiung worked fine. I have an ASUS P3V4x MB . I have recently upgraded my motherboard drivers and AGP gart Drivers and seems everything works fine in 4X now. I and also running directX 8.0a
hope this helps!