[gcollins]

I had a similar problem to many people on this forum in that Generals and Zero Hour refused to start on my Windows Vista Home Premium PC (although it did run file on my Vista Ultimate Laptop). I would get the splash screens in both games and then it would return back to the Vista desktop on Vista Home Premium. The posts from djdare helped, but no matter what I tried by editing the options.ini file (using the parameters for a NVIDIA card) the the games still refused to start. Not to be beaten I followed the advice and installed Windows XP onto the same machine and then installed Generals and Zero Hour.

The options created was slightly different to the one specified by djdare (due to different hardware specs), but I copied it across to my Windows Vista installation and both games now work perfectly. Analysing further I then went back to djdare's original options.ini file and changed the AntiAliasing to 3 (my graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS).

My suggestions to anyone still experiencing this problem is to play around with the AntiAliasing number as this worked for me.

Here is the contents of the options.ini file that I am using:

AntiAliasing = 3
CampaignDifficulty = 0
GameSpyIPAddress = 0.0.0.0
Gamma = 50
IPAddress = 0.0.0.0
IdealStaticGameLOD = High
LanguageFilter = false
MusicVolume = 55
Resolution = 1280 960
SFX3DVolume = 79
SFXVolume = 71
ScrollFactor = 50
SendDelay = no
StaticGameLOD = High
UseAlternateMouse = no
VoiceVolume = 70