Here's the text of an email I've sent to Blizzard tech support.  I'd appreciate hearing any comments anyone here has.  Thanks! Mike Hi, A couple of problems I'm having in Diablo II 1) Performance is very very choppy.  It's incredibly slow sometimes, especially if a lot of activity is on the screen.  Then it will slow down so much that audio skips and finally the system locks completely.  I can't even ctrl-alt-del to restart but have to reset power to the system. 2) My Diamond MX300 Aureal Vortex 2 soundcard is apparently not detected as when I try to switch to 3d sound, it never will let me turn it on.  I have the latest reference drivers from Aureal and have tested my direct sound in dxdiag and the system passes with flying colors. Here's what I've tried: 1) tested both video and audio in dxdiag and all components pass the tests. 2) Ran the video test again and run in direct-draw (or is it animation? can't recall exactly) instead of direct 3d.  When I do this, it seems to work ok. 3) Made sure all anti-virus, cd-rom authoring, etc from the system tray have been closed out or disabled while playing the game. Here's my system info: Creative Labs Ahnnilator Pro (GeForce DDR - 32 MB Ram) - Running Creative's 5.30 drivers _base_d on Nvidia's 5.30 detonator reference drivers PIII 650 FC-PGA Soyo 6BA+IV running 2ba2 bios (latest on site) DiamondMax Plus (7200 RPM) 27 GB Hard Drive - this drive is attached to the motherboard's onboard HighPoint ATA66 controller - the controller device driver and bios are the latest from the High-Point site. Diamond MX300 Soundcard - running Aureal Reference Drivers 2048 and latest A3D driver 128MB PC100 MB Ram 256MB fixed swap file on D: drive The system is not overclocked by FSB changes.  Any ideas on what I can try? Thanks in advance!! Mike

I have a cla sdram , sblive value , celeron 366, abit bx6, win 98 , 128 pc100 ram , not overclocked . it did not work for me also so I installed the fast trax drivers and  I reinstalled DirectX 7.a and it now works fine for me. sometimes its not always the graphics drivers fault but could be a problem with the sound cards drivers.