Steam Edition of Penumbra: Overture, B.P. & Requiem - Crashing

[saywut]

Hello I'm new to the board and I've been having similar problems as that of the OP. I have a Sager NP9262 gaming laptop with dual nVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTX cards (drivers 179.48 as of this posting - currently up to date) and the dreaded Vista 64 OS. Penumbra:Overture crashes and locks the computer even before I leave the Windows desktop.

I don't think it's a fault with the game, because I get this glitch with some other games, like Thief: Deadly Shadows and Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War. In Warhammer, I'm able to play in a windowed mode and that stops the crashes, but with Thief and Penumbra, I get a mega crash that forces me to reboot, regardless of whatever admin/compatability/ -window tweaks I try.

I'm thinking that Vista 64 and/or the nVIDIA drivers are having a problem jumping from my screen's 1900x1200 size to the default one for Penumbra. My hpl.log file is brief --

-------- THE HPL ENGINE LOG ------------

Creating Engine Modules
--------------------------------------------------------
Creating graphics module
Creating system module
Creating resource module
Creating input module
Creating sound module
Creating physics module
Creating ai module
Creating gui module
Creating haptic module
Creating scene module
--------------------------------------------------------

Initializing Resources Module
--------------------------------------------------------
Creating resource managers
Misc Creation
--------------------------------------------------------

Initializing Graphics Module
--------------------------------------------------------
Init low level graphics
Setting video mode: 800 x 600 - 32 bpp

-- Stupid Vista.

---

I figured out a stupid workaround...but it's a win for Vista 64:

- set my screen (via nVIDIA control panel) to 800x600
- run game (it runs!!!)
- set game video options to 1280x1024
- exit
- set my screen to 1280x1024 so I can see more than four icons
- run game

AND IT WORKS! :

I think I might try this for my other older games...stupid friggin' Vista!