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I ran half-life 2 successfully in the past on this computer. I recently reformatted and just reinstalled the game. I get the blurry "Loading..." screen, then it goes to a start screen with a bunch of Cartesian graph-like lines. You can see a grid outline of a guard walking around, and it makes the sounds when you mouse over the areas where there should be menu items, but you can't see any text or details.

This is on an eMachine T3256 with nVidia GeForce4 MX and 512MB RAM. Drivers and windows updates are all current.

Any ideas?

What version drivers were you using in the past? GeForce 4 is an older generation card, so newer version drivers don't include anything you need to run your card, and they may even have conflicts. My advice is rollback your drivers and find ones that were released around the time your card was manufactured, and use those. New nVidia drivers can have conflicts with Sun JAVA software as well, have you installed that lately?