Ah****. A while ago, I purchased (YES, PURCHASED) Grand Theft Auto III for the PC. It worked perfectly on this notebook, specs in signature, BEFORE my Vista upgrade. But, before I upgraded, I wiped my hard drive to factory settings, to free up all my space.

After the upgrade, it's been about... 6 months, give or take. Everything's worked fine, perfectly even, except once I installed GTA III.

I installed it, the install went fine, but when I attempted to run the game, using gta3.exe it:
1. Took about 70-80 seconds to even start any action. The circle-hourglass thing in Vista was there for the entire time. My music continued playing (in iTunes), and everything worked fine.
2. The game ran, and went fullscreen. My resolution stayed the same. It stayed black for the longest time. The hourglass thing was there for the entire time.
3. Without warning, the black screen disappears (this usually happens when I try to play the game, obviously), but went to the DESKTOP, with Aero turned off, no error messages, etc. up. It just shut down the application. Aero turned itself back on, and the computer worked fine again. gta3.exe wasn't even in task manager.

Are there any patches available, or solutions, to my problem?

Thank you SO MUCH in advance.

-- Alex