I can't get Curse of Monkey Island to work on my system, according to the DirectX 5.0 installer/info thingy all my drivers (DirectX ver 8.1) are certified EXCEPT the 'primary display' one - it just has a string of zeros after it. I'm using the latest Detonator for my nVIDIA GeForce DDR (30.82), which I assume is DX certified, so what's the problem? Monkey Island 1, 2 and 4 work fine.

Sys Info:

Win98 SE
PIII 667
nVIDIA GeForce DDR
256Mb RAM

All suggestions are greatly appreciated

More detail needed, you have an uncertified driver - fine.
Why cant you run cmi? What happens when you click 'play the curse of monkey island'? Does it load, does it load and crash? Does it keep telling you to install directx?

OK, when I try to run it everything seems fine (no requests to reinstall DirectX, no error messages), but the game only gets as far as blacking the screen before it stops. If I then press Enter it returns to Windows but there's no 'CMI' tab on the taskbar.

Ok
Make sure that that really is the latest driver (im far too lazy to check).
Try disabling the various graphics acceleration features. See here (http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=71839) for how to load dxdiag, which lets you do this.

Disabling the various options (via DXDiag) has no effect, except that with all options disabled "no hardware support" now appears next to 'Primary Display Driver'. I've tried both the nVIDIA reference driver AND the Vendor driver (both the latest versions), but I get the same result with both.

Ok then lets try something radical.
Try running it in a window.
Taken from the ScummRev site:

It's also possible to play Curse of Monkey Island in a window, rather than full screen. Simply put in your CMI CD 1, and from the DOS prompt, go to the root of that CDROM. Then run COMI.EXE from your install directory with the parameter 'g'. Example:

Or to do the same thing you could make a shortcut to COMI.EXE and have the target line read something like this:
"C:\Program Files\LucasArts\Curse\COMI.EXE" g

Aha, here's something new....did the altered shortcut thing, so now it starts in a window then gives the error 'unable to load resource\font0.nut'.
So it would seem that something is missing.......

Erm my stupid mistake, the shortcut I showed you in my previous reply was to COMI.exe on the hd, you need to run/make a shortcut to the one on the cd.

I've just moved house so everything is in chaos, I'll get back to you in a few days. Thanks for the help so far.

OK...found the CDs, tried the shortcut thingy, no luck there. Opened in a window but then popped up the same "can't load resource\font.nut0" (or whatever it was last time). Now, I can see that on the CD so why can't it find it?

Right, lets just run it off hd then.
Make a new folder called 'Resource' in your curse folder.

Cd1:
Copy COMI.LA0 and COMI.LA1 to your curse folder.
Copy the contents of the RESOURCE folder to the resource folder on your hd.

Cd2:
Copy COMI.LA2 to your curse folder.
Copy the contents of the RESOURCE folder to the resource folder on your hd. If prompted to overwrite, do so.

Now take the cds out and launch COMI.exe
If it still doesnt work make a shortcut to COMI.exe and in the target box it should look like this (unless you have it installed to a different location of course)
"C:\Program Files\LucasArts\Curse\COMI.EXE" g

Guess what?

IT'S ALL WORKING!!

On a hunch I swapped my soundcard for a friend's, and now CMI runs just fine. It would seem mine is a little dodgy and must have been messing with CMI's startup.

So thanks for the help you've offered.

Monkeys here I come.......