Okay, this is getting old. I will be playing the game, when suddenly it just locks up for about 10 seconds, leaving nothing but a black screen. If I ALT+TAB to bring up a Firefox window (I almost always have one open), it switches just fine. I can then ALT+TAB back to the game.
But once this happens, the graphics are corrupted, with what look like stray triangles everywhere. It's almost completely unplayable once I reach this point.
I've seen this problem happen during two situations. First is when loading into a new map - it will sometimes lock up while loading (but once it's loaded, I'm fine unless the 2nd condition occurs).
The second condition is that it will rarely do the same thing when a group of monsters spawn (while in the Clockworks, of course).
The machine is an older Dell, Celeron 2.5 Ghz, 2GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9250 graphics with 256 MB, Windows XP (fully patched).
I had the latest Java for XP installed before installing the game, as well as the latest video drivers.
This is getting extremely frustrating - I have yet to even reach T2, since I can't manage to make it through T1 without hitting this glitch at least once, and the graphics glitches makes it unplayable, so I wind up having to recall to Haven. Today was the worst - reached Depth 7, got halfway through, and it glitched, leaving me unable to finish.
(anyone know an emoticon for someone yanking out handfuls of hair?)
So this means you are using the Catalyst 6.11? A Radeon 9250 is based as a cheaper to manufacture solution to the Radeon 8500, so just be aware that it is right on the nose of the minimum specified graphics adapter for this game.
Are you running this game fullscreen or windowed? You may be able to circumvent this error by keeping the windowed to there isn't as large of a screen switching action.