The demo to Racedriver GRID worked perfectly on my Core2 XP pc with an 8800GT and bags of RAM so I was surprised to find that the full game wouldn't run. I got the splash screen followed by the 'encountered an error and has to close' message.

I installed the 1.2 patch and same problem.

So I did a Google and found that loads of people had the same issues with GRID not starting especially in XP. Some fixes were suggested which worked for some people but didn't for others.....none worked for me.

Anyway, I tried something simple which fixed a game a few years ago for me and it worked for GRID too. So for anyone else who has this same problem and has not found a solution yet try this....

Go to RUN and type DXDIAG.
Click the Sound tab.
Move the Hardware Acceleration slider to the left and Exit.
Try running the game.

If the game now runs you can experiment moving the slider more and more to the right again until the game fails so you need to find the happy medium.

There is a hardware acceleration slider in the game menus too but obviously you have to get the game started to use it!! It seems that game prefers a dedicated sound card but if like me you have onbaord sound you need to turn this setting down to start the game.

Hope this might help someone anyway with this frustrating problem.

By the way the game is well worth the £10 they sell it for now in my opinion.