siaoant

Hi guys, I desperately need help I am currently running on P4 2.8 GHZc 512mb ram ATI Radeon 9600 256MB WinXP SP2 (comes with DirectX 9.0b) It seems we got to have DirectX 9.0C installed in order to run The Sims 2. (Mine is original version) The thing is, my directx9.0c setup does not seem to be able to run at all. when i click next>> in the installation dialog, it immediately led me to a screen whereby it says installation for directx 9.0c is completed. I thought maybe my PC was very fast and installation had completed within 1 sec. I was so wrong. I finished installing The Sims 2 and excitedly went straight to run the game. A message "Unable to initalise DIrect3d. Please ensure that DIrectx9.0c is installed" Well never mind, I went on to microsoft site to download the directx9.0c setup but the setup brought me to the "installation completed" screen almost immediately again. Next, I went ahead with updating my graphics card driver. It didnt help. I even went on to browse many many forums and tried all kinds of methods and even resorted to using DirectX Eradicator 1.09 (though risky) to uninstall the current version of Directx 9.0b. After that i opened dxdiag and checked that my version had been reverted to direct x8.1. After that I tried to do all I could again but the best I could do was to get it back to Directx 9.0b again. Sigh. Can someone help me please? Has it got to do with my version of windows? I have done everything I could except reformat.. Thanks in advance