I purchased a HP AMD64 3500+ computer and installed a 256mb ATI X700 Pro PCIE video card. When I attempted to play a game "American Conquest - Three Centuries of War" the screen goes black and I get the following message.
Loading error (2)
Unable to initialize Direct Draw
It is possible that the hardware acceleration is turned off.

I ran the windows diagnostic program and everything checked OK and shows that the acceleration is turned on. I have basic knowledge on computers so I I asked the computer guru at work what he thought the problem may be. He said he had never heard of Direct Draw. I went as far as to run the recovery disks and reinstall windows in case there was a problem when first loaded at the factory. Didn't correct the problem. I have always had Intel systems and was wondering if this is a quirk with AMD since the game worked on my old Intel 933 system.
Thanks for any assistance.
Clay

i too have the same freakin error which sucks cause i used to play this exact game on my same computer. the only thing i can think of is i upgraded my video card and it may not like the change. but direct draw is simply a graphics engine similar to directx, i just wish someone would help me out with this...

The most common cause of this is not having the mainboard chipset drivers installed correctly, bad or missing DirectX 9.0c, or incorrectly installed video drivers.

Just because windows has acceleration- it doesn't mean you have DirectX acceleration working. You can check this by going:
Start Menu, Run
and type: dxdiag in the box and press OK

DxDiag has tabs. If you click on the tab at the top labeled "Display", it will report the Acceleration status of DirectX/Direct Draw/Direct 3D.

If DxDiag does not launch, you need to re-install DirectX 9.0c from www.microsoft.com/directx

If acceleration is disabled, you need to obtain the chipset drivers for your motherboard. These will be specific to your system and chipset. After this step, the video drivers (for the ATI above, hit www.ati.com and click the "Find a Driver" link under Customer Care).