edit : forgot to mention I'm also running the latest patch from the Painkiller webby (1.3.5) and WinXPSP1

Can't seem to edit posts, that disabled here?

edit : so I do, thought I was

I had all the above problems and tried all the above fixes, nothing worked

So I did another wee search and found out from an official forum (can't remember which one) that you have to install DirectX 9.0c, as all the issues are with version 9.0b. Nice Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=0A9B6820-BFBB-4799-9908-D418CDEAC197&displaylang=en

At last I can run Painkiller