Thanks for the explanation.

I spent the entire morning diagnosing my directx and then a full scan of my operating system, and then I even restored my PC back to July. Reinstalled all the microsoft and other updates and yet the game continues to exhibit this problem. While this has been a periodic problem that has occured occasionally, and only during log in, or immediately following log in, it can either terminate the game or sometimes even freeze up my PC to the point I can't even do a restart and have to manually shut down the PC.

My frustration here is I have an AMD 5870 card, not Nvidia, and this has NEVER been a problem for the 2 years I've been playing this game. All of a sudden, as of a couple of patches ago, this is a major issue. So clearly, this is something SE has done in the way they did their patch. Further, I have yet to see a reply from the develpment team for ANY of these directx issues. As I understand it, directx is supposed to be backwards compatible. If I thought I only had to live with this until 2.0 I'd be less concerned, but it seems as though I saw that SE's design point for 2.0 is directx 9, which makes me nervous this issue will continue.

So, I would very much appreciate a response from the development team shedding some light on this. If this was to continue to be an issue in 2.0, I'm simply not going to play this game. Regards.