I just bought Splinter Cell Chaos Theory for PC, but I cannot get the Singleplayer mode to work at all. However the "Versus" mode does seem to work ok.

When I go to the Main Menu for the Singleplayer mode, the Mouse cursor looks like a Black Square, which I dont think it should look like.

Then when I try to start an actual Singleplayer game, I can get up to the weapon loadout screen and choose the weapons etc, but then when I click on the button to begin the mission I get an error message saying "splintercell3.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience".

My PC specs are:
Athlon 1700Xp (1.4GHz processor)
ATI Radeon 9600XT graphics card
512 MB RAM
Windows XP SP2 O.S.
DirectX version 9c

I have patched the game to the latest version 1.05, and my graphics card is running the latest Catalyst 6.12 drivers from the ATI website. Also: I am playing the Euro/AU edition of the game.

I used the "Configuration utility" program and it says my PC meets all the minimum requirements for the game.

I have tried uninstalling and re-installing the game several times, and I have also tried lowering all the graphics settings and resolution to the lowest settings. For the "Shader Mode" I have tried selecting 1.1 and also 2.0, but both settings still give the same error message.

As another test, I tried to run the "Timedemo.bat" file in the "system" directory, but I also got the same error message.

As suggested by someone else on this forum, I also tried "disabling Visual Themes" on the SPLINTERCELL3.EXE file. (This was performed by right clicking on the SPLINTERCELL3.EXE file and in the "Compatibility" tab, selecting "Disable Visual Themes"). However, even with the Visual Themes disabled I still got the error message for Singleplayer mode.


Please Note: the "Versus" mode does work perfectly, its just the Singleplayer mode dosent work, as described above.

Also, I tried to play the demo version before I bought the full game, but the demo also had the exact same problem with the Singleplayer mode.

Does Splinter Cell Chaos Theory not work properly on the ATI graphics cards? Or otherwise is there something else I need to do to get this game to work?

I would greatly appreciate any help. Thankyou.

Okay, I have managed to get it working now.

Anyway, what I did was to use the "msconfig" utility to disable all the background processes.

To do this I use the following steps: Click on "Start", "Run", then type "msconfig" and press enter. Then go to the "Startup" tab and click on "Disable All", then it will ask you to reboot your computer.

Im not sure why the Versus mode always worked fine, but the Singleplayer mode didnt work. But it must have been something to do with the background processes on my computer.

However, everything is fine now.

How I got it working was because I got a reply email back from the Ubisoft Technical Support team who suggested using msconfig. This was quite amazing as I thought they would never get back to me. They took nearly 2 weeks to reply. LOL

I hope this helps anyone else who is having problems getting this game to work.