Certain graphics cards have problems with the underwater sequences. It is noted here.

http://www.play-old-pc-games.com/2012/05/23/no-one-lives-forever/

I'm not too sure that there is a fix as I do not have the issue.

Yeah, I know you are. Unfortunately the only solution that I know of is to buy a dedicated graphics card.

You probably installed something that altered your copy of Windows in some way. Think about it this way : What are the variables in play? The game has remained constant (as you say). What has changed? Do you have automatic updates turned on?

Indeed. It's just a matter of figuring out what the variable that's causing a failure state to occur. In most cases like this, I find just going back to zero to be the easiest thing to do. It could even be a rogue or bad registry setting that got stored and causes an issue when the game attempts to use that information.

I encountered this with Dungeon Keeper 2 (which is notoriously buggy in many incarnations) and even went so far as to make a copy of the registry branch as a baseline to copy back for testing settings (The end-result I found to not use resolutions higher that 800x600).

OP : Last-ditch effort : If you're savvy enough, I'd recommend a complete uninstall, reboot, and then search the registry for entries related to the game (a bit of an art) and removing them manually. BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL doing this, should you opt to. Back up the entire registry first. This is not a strategy for the inexperienced as you could make your system unusable if you delete random things without making educated calls on them. This is a risky strategy unless you're experienced with registry editing. Fair warning!

Do an internet search for that file. There's ample information out there on how to address that problem.

pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/No_One_Lives_Forever#Black_screen_when_underwater solved my problem with an underwater black screen.

If you are going to be playing a lot of games, invest in a Nvidia or AMT card. The Intel Chip Set is notorious for being shitty for gaming purposes. A lot of games....and not demanding ones in term or respources..openly say they do not work on Intel Chip sets.
NOLF is lucky in that it has a very dedicated fanbase, and they keep the game playable on Modern Computers.
As stated, the game itself actually runs well on a modern computers, problem is the original version (not the GOTY edition) had a 16 bit installer,and Windows 64 bit does not like 16 bit programs. (why,only Microsoft knows). But there are a couple of workarounds, including a installer for the game that works with 64 bit systems.

There must be something weird with the OP's computer, since the success rate of running NOLF on Windows 7 and beyond has been very high with the right fixes.

so i got nolf (no goty) to work on win10, might work on win7 as well...
here is what i did:
there are several language folders in the installation folder, each with their own set of *.exe's. i noticed that the one for my language (german) had a different behavior than the rest (at least it tried to do something) but i still got the "missing stuff" errors. so i copied the nolf.exe from the german folder into the main installation folder, set it to compatibility mode winxp sp3 & admin mode and it ran!

so maybe that'll be of help to anyone, let me know if that worked for you or not!

This is a bit of a necropost but I was having a similar issue as OP where the install worked fine but
I couldn't get the game to run. I'm running Windows 7 and have the original (not GOTY edition) of the
game so I needed to grab the 32 bit installer, game patch from v1.0 to v1.3, and finally patch up to 1.4.
After that, I plopped the nolf.exe from the German directory and it started up. I don't read German but
on the initial startup I choose the top most option of the 3 which I think is the direct 3d diver version.
So, thank you for this extremely weird solution that worked four years later!

tl;dr: German executable FTW.

Use the versions off:
http://nolfrevival.tk/

Also, just a heads up, win 7 is no longer in support, move to win 10.