Another Enigma Rising Tide: Gold Edition question...

[Kalte Lanze]

It seems a few others on the board have recently (or fairly recently) started playing this game. I bought it new because of this site lol

Well, here's my horrendously annoying problem.

I recently built a new computer, 4 gigs of RAM, 750 GB of HD space, nVidia 260 GTX gpu, and a 3.16 GHz Wolfsdale dual core processor. Well, since I hate Vista, I installed XP x64 on the rig.

Since then I basically moved everything off my old computer onto this one, including games. I got around SH3's incompatibility with x64 issue with a no CD patch. It was no surprise to me that Enigma Rising Tide also disliked the x64 edition of XP so I did the no CD patch with that as well (and yes these are both legit copies and I can prove it :P)

So anyway, with the no CD patch I can make it to the menu screen, but gods help me I can't enter any game mode without a crash to the desktop.

Is there any makeshift or even horribly "ghetto" way I can possibly get this game to run on my machine? I don't want to install it on my old computer (I have too many running as it is and not enough room for more monitors/keyboards etc), I don't want to upgrade to Vista (which is also incompatible with this game I hear), and I surely don't want to remove everything off this computer and reformat with Server 2003.

For reference, a x32 bit OS will not make full use of my 4 GB of RAM, which is why I have x64 bit edition of XP. Server 2003 can supposedly handle 128 GB of RAM because it is for servers.

Any help would be massively appreciated.