[KaworuNagisa]

I've done quite a bit of testing and still have had no luck with the infamous black screen... =/ I can benchmark absolutely fine and go through character select with beautiful quality... And I don't need to turn on the simple character creation option either in the config tool.. They were running around in damned good style like they should be - not static.

System Specs:
Athlon XP 2000
Asus A7N266 Motherboard
1024 DDR2100 ram
Geforce 4 TI4200 128 meg.

I've removed and reinstalled direct X 9.0b with no luck. Fresh removals and installations of the newest nvidia drivers yielded the black screen. I just took out the graphics card and ran with my geforce2 onboard graphics and had the exact same problem.. As soon as I select my character, select my handle and hit play, the game loads up... Bottom right says downloading data. Once I enter the game, I see small fragments of what looks to be a blue chat box and the rest is black. I can see the mouse and click - it changes directions.. colors.. etc - just like in the game.. I can hear rushing water nearby and so on soforth.

I did this on a friend's PC with near identical specs. She had no luck either - and we're both got geforce4 ti4200 cards. I've read of people playing the game with these cards fine - so that should not be an issue.. Hell - Square Enix supports the damned thing and it's listed on their website.

So what is the deal? I've tweaked with all of the graphics settings over and over again and taken my card back to base stats and not overclocked.

If you bring up the router issue - that's bullshit. I'm on a college dorm and I figured that might be a problem. The girl lives about an hour away in the cities and she has a completely different ISP. Just to test it - I dialed up a firewall-less ISP with no ports blocked and had the EXACT same problem.

Has anybody found a fix for this? The character creation is absolutely stunning - I don't know why I can't play the rest of the game. It's very very disappointing =/ I scored around 3600 bench as well in V2 of the Vana'diel bench...

Any lucky anybody? =/ So many people are having this problem.. I'd kill for a fix =(((