I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to give this game another playthrough. I have PST:EE and it's fine and dandy - but felt a little more attached to the original EXE and its 90s' quirks - so wanted to give that a go.

I'm experiencing a weird issue where the game works the first time it is launched, but all subsequent launches until a reboot have a black screen with a bar on it until the game process is killed.

Once I hard reboot the machine, the game works fine again that first launch.

I've tried quite a few things, and can't quite explain it yet.

- This GOG support article suggested reinstalling the included ddrawfix. No effect.

- This enlightening BeamDog forum post points out some quirks with later versions of Win11's compatibility fixes and how to go about changing deeper settings for a particular app. The suggested fix had no effect.

- No combination of Windows right-click compatibility settings and/or ie-ddrawfix settings resolved.

- Going and getting another copy of ie-ddrawfix did not resolve.

- My programmer instinces suggested poking at tmpfiles, caches, or settings it might be writing. Something that is per-boot, like in %TEMP%. Nothing seems relevant in the system or user tempfiles. The only change to the game's INI file since install is the game noting I've seen the intro movies - deleting the INI entries does not resolve. There is a cache dir created in the game install dir after launch, but deleting it does not resolve.

Machine is running Windows 11 24H2, with an NVidia Titan XP and the current latest gameready driver, 576.16 - if that is meaningful to anyone.

I'm not familiar enough with the Windows ecosystem to really get much further, sadly.

Can't explain the behavior, but I did figure out a workaround and a solution.

I quickly discovered the GOG Windows distribution of the game works perfectly fine under Proton. So, if you have a Linux machine, that is an easy workaround.

As well, replacing the GOG-included ie-ddrawfix with the more generic dxwrapper got it working like a charm for me.

1. Install the game from GOG's exe or galaxy, as normal
2. in the game's directory, run setup-ddrawfix.exe and uninstall it
3. Download the dx7-oriented dx7to9 build of dxwrapper. (dx7.games.zip - I had success with release v1.2.7500.25, and dump the contents into the game's installation folder.
4. Open dxwrapper.ini in a text wrapper, and set SingleProcAffinity to 1. This tells windows to only let it use a single CPU core - which resolves some startup quirks.

This got the game booting consistently without blackscreen issues for me. There may be more odd graphics issues awaiting me, but I've had no problem starting up the game and slashing a zombie in the Mortuary.

Cheers