[Desert Siege crashes to desktop]

I was all ready to take this piece of garbage software back to the store. For 2-3 days me and my brother have been trying to get Desert Siege working again to no avail. Reinstalling patches, reinstalls, changing sound and video drivers, and lots of other ridiculous things. I even tried reading some of the condescending advice from the offical Ubisoft support forums by their moderators ( they are totally full of ###### BTW ).

I gave up, I deleted the MP1 folder from the mods directory and I decided I'd just take it back to the store and get my money back. Then late tonight when I finished playing regular ol' GR with my brothers I went on a hunch and tried one last thing. During all the troubleshooting we were doing I tried installing GR+DS on another computer that's on my home LAN. I wanted to see if it'd work or not. It didn't. But when I deleted GR from that system I saved the MP1 folder for future troubleshooting.

..I had to repatch GR on my system after I deleted the MP1 folder because GR was crashing. Repatched and it was up and running and I was online playing. Then when I logged offline I had one last idea. I tried copying the virginal MP1 folder that was created by the patches and placed it in another drive. Then I copied the saved MP1 folder from the install on the OTHER system to the mods directory on this one. Then I copied the virginal patch-created MP1 directory over that MP1 and HOLY######! It frickin worked!

Go me!!

[Desert Siege crashes to desktop]

The last time I played Desert Siege was last night online. I hosted a game - I play all the time with my brothers. I just recently got Desert Siege and it worked pretty flawless 'til tonight. I went to start the game and it crashed and sent me back to the desktop without any error messages. I checked the LOG files but nothing stood out. No problems with initiating the video or the sound.

Ok, I try reinstalling v.1.3 & 1.4 patches, I look for info online hoping to find fixes for people with similar issues. Nothing. Ok, I finally got Ghost Recon to run by deleting the line that refers to Desert Siege out of the MODSSET.TXT file. Put it back in and it crashes. I then try removing all the other unofficial mods. I delete my save games. Nothing works. I then try deleting the XML files and BOOM it's up and running. It works fine, no problems, I just have to reconfigure everything. Ok. I exit out of the game and then try restarting it to make sure it really is working now and it crashes. I narrowed it down to the option.xml file. Whenever I delete that file the game will run ONCE. Once, u exit it out you have to delete it in order to run the game again.

Does ANYBODY have a clue as to what the heck is going on here? The only change I made to GR since installing DS is applying the tiny multiplayer patch. I thank you for your time and hope someone has a fix.