That black box is the Lithtech engine being loaded. It's trying to arrange everything so that the MM9 engine can be run. It might be crashing due to a sound or memory problem, but a graphics problem is the most common by far.

The first question we have to answer is whether your graphics card meets the minimum requirements -- 16MB of grapphics RAM and DirectX 8 compatibility. I assume that you already have DX8 (or higher) installed. If not, talk to us before you upgrade.

Click Start, then Run. Enter 'dxdiag' an click OK. The last entry on the opening page tells you your version of DX.

Click the Display tab. The amount of RAM on your graphics card (or the amount of RAM allocated to graphics if you are using a motherboard with built-in graphics) is in the top left-hand box. Let us know what it says and we'll go from there.