When I start this game, I get to see the microsoft game studios animation, then the screen turns darkblue and freezes, the harddrive works for about 10 seconds then stops. This game requires DX9, and I have it installed, since I have a Radeon 9700PRO. Stupid game. Please help! :)

Asus A7V8X. AMD AthlonXP 2000+. 512Mb PC2700. Connect3D Radeon 9700PRO. Creative Audigy player.

Have you got the nimo codec pack installed or the k-lite codec pack try uninstalling them if you do.

The game for the most part runs fine for me except their is intermitant sound distortion in the game, the readme says you may encounter this problem with a soundblaster live but I have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz which has never given me any trouble. So I don't know whats going wrong all the readme says is that make sure you have the latest MP3 codec installed.

The other more annoying problem is when quitting the game the desktop screen becomes corruptted and the mouse is no longer useable. But the keyboard still works and I can shut down and restart the comp that way.

It's a good game though I just hope they sort these things out

Athlon XP 2100
SiS 745
512MB DDR 333
GF 4 TI4200
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

Thanks, now the game is running, but the sound is now bugging instead. MP3 codecs you say, were can I find them?

Unfortunately I have not been able to find a solution to either of the problems I am having.

You could try this though
Lower the hardware acceleration level for the sound card via the dxdiag utility.

Reinstall windows media player/winamp or something like that to get the MP3 codec.
Neither of those worked for me but you might have better luck

Damnit! I miss half of the dialogs in the game. that's pretty annoying. Some cutscenes don't have sound at all.

Try this, taken from the readme file:
Missing Game Sounds
If you experience missing game sounds throughout Freelancer Trial Version then a different audio codec is probably being used rather than the one provided by Freelancer Trial Version.

• Please follow these steps if some sounds and speech are still missing after installation:
• Uninstall any 3rd party codec pack or the Nimo Codec pack from your system.
• Uninstall Freelancer Trial Version.
• Go to the following directory, C:\WINDOWS\system32 and delete the file “l3codecp.acm”. If there happens to be another file named “l3codeca.acm”, delete this too.
• If your system is Windows 98 or ME, open the system.ini file located in your system folder; C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM. Delete ONLY the line that starts with “msacm.l3acm=”. In the case of the Nimo codec pack, this will read “msacm.l3acm=l3codecp.acm”
• If your system is Windows 2000 or XP, open the system registry editor (regedit) from the RUN command window.
• Locate and delete the following key: \HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32\msacm.l3acm
• Load the Freelancer Trial Version installation CD and locate the REDIST folder. Within the REDIST folder, double click on the file named “WMFADist.exe” and follow on-screen instructions.
• Install Freelancer Trial Version.

I have a dual boot on my system between WinXP SP1 and Win2k SP3 and just installed the freelancer demo on win2k and it worked flawlessly.

The win2k is a relatively clean install the only difference is Nvidia drivers are 42.01 under win2k and 42.86 under winxp.

Also their are very few programs running in the background. Their were no audio problems at all.

It's working now, as you said, I had to uninstall every single codec, and then reinstall the game, then it worked. Strange, but that's life :)

Thanks again!

I still have problem with speech in Freelancer. I uninstalled Nimo pack, Xvid, even Quick Time. I didn't have the file named "l3codecp.acm", but i deleted file "l3codeca.acm" from 4 different directories. I only left a file named l3codeca.acm.mui. I didn't have key mentioned, so i didn't delete anything from registry. Is there anything else to do ?

This is the way I fixed all problems:

Uninstall Freelancer -> Uninstall Nimo codec pack (and other codecs to be sure) -> Re-Install Freelancer -> Re-Install Nimo (and other codecs).

Installing codecs after installing Freelancer seems to work fine