Great job finding the problem, hifi. Overclocking video cards can always lead to crazy difficult-to-diagnose problems like this. The only way to say for certain if it's the overclocking causing this is turning it off and seeing what happens (and turning the DX stuff back on). Let us know how it goes!

Ok..after trying a few things I re-OS'ed my system, installed the latest and greatest Windows 2k updates, installed the current version of Java...and guess what...all is working well now. Not sure what the problem really was but I am guessing a dll, vxd, or some other file related to DirectDraw became corrupted. I really don't believe that overclocking was the problem because I uninstalled the overclocking app and it did not make a difference. I may re-install it just to verify but there is an old saying that if it aint broken don't fix it! You all have a great evening and thanks for all of the advice!