Hi everyone.

I know this isn't the usual tech problem people ask about, but Ive been racking my brain, and I can't come up with a solution to my problem.

To make it short and sweet, basically, out of nowhere games like Half Life2(CS, Deathmatch..etc), Hitman Bloodmoney.. for a couple examples..start up fine, and the game background(as the main menu pops up) will flash for a second or two, but then the screen will go black. It doesnt seem to freeze my computer or anything. I am able to alt-tab to my desktop and quit the game. However, when I play City of Heroes/Villains the video works fine. Below is as much information about my PC without completely overdoing it. As far as I know all of my windows, gfx drivers and so on are completely up to date. It seems pretty random to me, as a few months ago these games worked fine. I took a break, and now coming back they don't work . I have also reinstalled the games completly, deleted the folders manually, and deleted them from the registry.

If any other information is need I can get that too. I'm fairly computer literate, so any suggestions are welcome. I really wouldn't want to reinstall windows, but if someone thinks that will really help, I'll give it a try

Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (build 2600)
1.80 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache
Board: 939Dual-SATA2 1.00
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. P2.20 06/09/2006
Drives
Memory Modules c,d
460.10 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
224.11 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
1Gig RAM

CD-ROM Drive
Generic DVD-ROM SCSI CdRom Device [CD-ROM drive]
SONY DVD RW DRU-820A [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]


NVIDIA GeForce 6600 [Display adapter]
Dell E151FPp [Monitor] (14.9"vis, s/n 6R644358L1EP, May 2003)