madcowtw: Vashu483 and Comrade P -

Hopefully you come back here. I was having the same issues you were both having - despite all the good tips in this thread none of it worked for me either (alas). Eventually I realized that the problem is the game attempting to play the movies, rather then load the game itself. When all else failed I decided I would see what happened when I just deleted the quicktime.qts file (which would load the movies) and that allows me to play the game!

So here's what I did to get the game to work. Hopefully it will work for you too:
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[1] - Install Septerra Core fresh.
[2] - Go to the Septerra Core directory - you'll find it in C:\Program Files\GOG.com\Septerra Core.
[3] - Backup/rename or delete the quicktime.qts file you'll find there. Get rid of it!
[4] - Run the game! For me it causes none of the cut scenes to load which isn't ideal, however the game itself will run fine - and in game cutscenes are skipped without any problem.

This should let you play the game (I hope). I am running off of a XP system here - so I don't know if it will work if you're running Windows 7, or Vista but hopefully it will fix your problem too. As for the movies themselves, hopefully I can view them on youtube or the like to see what it is that I'm missing.

Good luck!

bansama: It's not a brilliant solution, but if you make a backup of the .db files, delete or rename MONOLITH.DB then create a new text file and give that the name MONOLITH.DB, the game will at least skip all the videos at start up, allowing you to get to the in-game menu.

The downside, is not being able to watch the videos. And the character speech is still skipping before it ends. =/ I expect that if the in-game videos cause the same crashes, they will need to be skipped by creating dummy files too.

For what it's worth, I get the same errors with Win XP pro Service pack 3. I should try this on my other PC to see if it's an SP3 problem...

*** Fixed it ***

You need to go into your audio settings via control panel or however else you get to them (I have a quick launch icon for this)

Get to the audio details tab and turn off Hardware accleration (top slider) also set sample rate to the lowest setting (standard) (bottom slider). The videos will then play without crashing and the in game speech should not skip.

The names of the tabs and settings may vary for English OSes -- this is also probably an XP only fix.