Age of Mythology killed something... video problems!

OK, I'm having some kind of video problem here. Everything was working fine until I installed Microsoft Age of Mythology. It installed and played fine, but then when I tried to go and play GTAIII it wouldnt let me. It popped up an error message saying "Grand Theft Auto III requires at least 12MB of available video memory" ...WTF?

I have an Asus V7700 Ti with 32 megs of SGRAM, and I've never had anything like that happen. I figured maybe the new game put in some crazy version of DirectX or something so I lived with it for a few weeks till I finished it and uninstalled AoM yesterday. Still nothing. I even reinstalled GTA today and it says the same thing. I don't really want to reinstall my video drivers, but I might give it a try later on.

Does anyone have any ideas what this might be?? Please?

Alright, in addition to the above problems, I have also lost the ability to view icons in their full color depth, and this happened right after the AoM install. My desktop color depth is set to 32 bit, I have the box checked for display icons using all possible colors... I can't think of anything else I can do. This is really bugging me, does anyone have any thoughts?

[Uranium-235]

go into dxdiag (from start->run) and see if you see anything wrong

Thanks Uranium, good call! I got this message...

Direct3D test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8007000e (Out of memory)

...which would seem to go along with the GTA3 needing more memory problem, right? But I still have no idea what the problem might be, or why it affects my icon display either.

Oh, also, when I try o run another game (Sports Car GT) the setup screen at the startup won't allow me to use direct3D... the only option not greyed out under 'select video driver' is 'software'. I'm pretty sure I used to have direct 3D as my default there. (the game won't work either)

[Uranium-235]

what version of directX do you have?

Download the latest drivers for your video card.

I got the latest version of directx today... 8.1 (4.08.01.0901)

And I had the last released drivers for my video card by Asus, and then I downloaded the newest Nvidia drivers a few days ago. None of these changes helped anything unfortunately.

Just a quick update, I'm still trying things, and a reboot into Windows 98 worked fine, full color icons, etc., so I can at least rule out a hardware problem for sure, its something to do with Win 2000.

I logged on (to win 2000) as a different user, and the same thing, bad color icons, games won't work.

At least its getting narrowed down, but I'm pretty much out of ideas. What else can I try?

i had the same problem with direct 3d using both direct-x8.1 & 9.0
out of memory
so i disabled direct 3d tried running game. it failed w/same error
i than reenabled direct 3d and ran the direct 3d test. the computer gods liked this verry much :-) and fixed my problem.
try it your self it worked for me. lol
good luck!!!

How did you disable direct 3d? Did you do it in the game or globally?