FINALY!, I have managed to find the problem with the new video card drivers and DX9, it took 3 days to work out what was happening, when I installed the latest Nvidia driver alongside my DX 9.0a install suddenly my video card ( GeForce 4 MX 440 ) decided it was a 2D card, at the same time Programmer_holic was installing a new fx 5200 video card with the same drivers and it refused to work, also thinking it was a 2D video card, in both cases DX diag gave the same sequence of error messages and we have spent the last few sorting out just what the problem was, for example, on my system I had no errors on directdraw (same for PH), but we both got the same errors in DX diag (although initialy PH had some problems with crashes), as follows
direct 3D 7 interfaces
test failed at step 8 creating 3D device Hresult=0x80004005 (generic failure)
creating DX8 device
test failed at step 8 creating 3D device Hresult=0x8876086c (error code)
this test uses hardware accelerated direct 3D 9 interfaces
test failed at step 8 creating 3D device Hresult=0x8876086c (error code)
after a lot of fiddling with settings and installing different drivers and windows several times we found the problem, but it has TWO solutions (depending on your motherboard), PH REMOVED his AGP port controler driver and allowed windows to install the default driver (not specific to his MOBO), while I found that removal did nothing but downloading the latest driver for my AGP controler cured the faults, now we both have working systems
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so if anyone has problems with DX9.0a and Nvidia drivers (this may also apply to Radeon drivers...not sure), then you may well be advised to remove or update your current MOBO AGP controler driver, since this gets everything working properly, cheers.
Mentor.