I haven't played the game in quite a while, due to my old PC dying. I had my files backed up on a slave drive, and to understand how long it's been since I last played the "latest patch" that I had in storage was 0.86 or so.
I recently reinstalled the game onto my rebuilt PC, including the new 1.06 patch. Everything was working great up until a few days ago though. For some reason, every once in a while the menu screen will go black on me. The game still works, but in order to get menu graphics back again I needed to restart the game client. I could still use hotkeys to save, load, exit, etc.
But last night, restarting the client stopped fixing the problem. Now I get a completely black menu screen immediately upon running the game. I can still use function keys to save, load, etc but I can't see squat until the game loads up. What I CAN see on those black menu screens is the white text showing the version number in the upper right corner, but that's it.
I normally run 1280x1024 resolution, so I tried swapping to 1024x768. Funny thing is, it fixed the problem...for a while. This morning, the same thing happened at the new resolution as well; menu screens go all black, restarting the client doesn't fix the problem. And no, I have no intentions of running the game on 800x600 (this isn't Windows 3.1 anymore).
I have not installed any of the mods yet. Just a fresh install, applied the 1.06 patch, and started up a new game. The menu screens work fine with 800x600 for now, but when trying to load up 1024x768 or 1280x1024 I still see just the black screen with version number. I have tried adjusting graphics options, but haven't found anything that fixes the issue.
I don't recall having this problem EVER during previous patch versions, and I played for several months before. I have been playing for less than a week now and I'm already getting this problem at least once a day (prior to having permanent black screen).
Any ideas on what might be causing this, or and how to fix it? Again, it doesn't prevent me from playing the game as long as I use function keys to save/load/exit. But it is pretty annoying that nothing I try will fix it. Makes me wonder what else is going to mess up next.
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