I have windows 98 and an ATI radeon 7200.

I get an "illegal operation" window which crashes vendetta when I do any of the following things:
- going through wormholes (it's happened on 3 or 4 of them haven't tried the rest yet)
- starting up vendetta (right after the updater screen when the game just comes up... before i get to any menu though)
-at the end of the logout countdown

These crashes do not happen every time but seem to come in sequence. Whenever I get a wormhole crash and try to restart the game I get the "starting up vendetta" problem. That problem can be fixed and I can get back into the game by rebooting my computer. Wormhole crashes seem to happen at random but then again I dont know the code. Has anyone else had these problems?

-outrider

Interesting. Does it show the details of the crash in the illegal operation dialog box (it should be a bunch of numbers) and if so, can you post the contents here?

this is the wormhole crash details:

VENDETTA caused an invalid page fault in
module ATIO9XXX.DLL at 0177:69106445.
Registers:
EAX=00000900 CS=0177 EIP=69106445 EFLGS=00010206
EBX=00000900 SS=017f ESP=0078fba4 EBP=028a58b0
ECX=06700c90 DS=017f ESI=06700c90 FS=1d27
EDX=028a58b0 ES=017f EDI=063fa580 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
8b 86 04 01 00 00 32 db 33 ed 83 f8 07 57 8b 7e
Stack dump:
063fa5a8 028a58b0 00000900 690fe81d 028a5800 00000000 028a58e4 69105c6b 028a58e4 028a58b0 691f7370 691f7370 691d43c4 691e0418 ffffffff 09968894

here is the logging off crash details:

VENDETTA caused an invalid page fault in
module ATIO9XXX.DLL at 0177:69105c5d.
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=0177 EIP=69105c5d EFLGS=00010202
EBX=00000000 SS=017f ESP=0078fbc8 EBP=691f7370
ECX=691f7370 DS=017f ESI=00000000 FS=33d7
EDX=028a58b0 ES=017f EDI=028a58e4 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
8b 0e 85 c9 57 8b ea 74 05 e8 85 8b ff ff 8b 46
Stack dump:
028a58b0 691f7370 691f7370 691d43c4 691e0418 ffffffff 0906f7d4 691c178f 69105be0 00000000 691f7370 028a58b0 0078fc70 092ecdd4 69105b5b 00000001

here are the starting up crash details:

VENDETTA caused a general protection fault
in module KERNEL32.DLL at 0177:bff72843.
Registers:
EAX=00002d34 CS=0177 EIP=bff72843 EFLGS=00010206
EBX=00787000 SS=3ce7 ESP=00007d34 EBP=00007d78
ECX=026bc804 DS=017f ESI=0000333f FS=333f
EDX=00013ce7 ES=017f EDI=0000017f GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
66 cb 8b f4 64 8b 15 18 00 00 00 8d 52 f8 56 52
Stack dump:
00000000 01af0028 75988d50 000004af 8d660000 000002ea 00002edf 001018ff 691cd9c1 00787000 0000000e 2edf0000 8d7a0000 05ff0406 0078ed78 0078ed3c


The start up crash i could only recreate after it froze at the loading screen right before I go into game (this was after I did the other two crash types) and had to end task it. So that might be "random" as well instead of a problem that came from the other crashes.

-outrider

ATIO9XXX.DLL, I'm guessing, is your ATI video driver, and that's what seems to be crashing. Do you have the latest video drivers?

Ok I installed the new drivers from ATI and this corrected the "illegal operation" problem. However, unless I am in DirectX drivers my computer will either freeze or throw up a "no device context" window which I can push "OK" in. If I push OK vendetta crashes. It has these problems when I try to go through wormholes or look at just about anything but just the backround (roids, stations, wormholes etc all make it freeze or crash).

Yeah, I would say it's ati's drivers breaking.
Please use directx mode.
I did notice that some of your settings for your directx mode are very wrong which I think may be the cause of your dx mode not looking right.
Try deleting your config.ini file and try directx mode again.

What exactly does the 'no device context' window say?
Also, try setting the background detail to OFF and see if that helps.
Also, if you're having radar issues in directx mode, try setting the ps_hack flag to 1 in the config.ini file under the [directx] section.

Ok deleted the config.ini and directx is working (including the radar now that I did the ps_hack change). It's late and I'll see if I can recreate the 'no device context' for you tomorrow, thx for all the help devs

-outrider