The Orange Box In Slow Motion Addenda

Turns out all my troubleshooting in the previous post was just a lucky coincidence.  In the past 6 days attempting to get The Orange Box to work I couldn't reliable find a method to get the game to run.  This involved updating drivers, disabling on-board sound, and running DirectX tests.  No matter what I did I couldn't reliable get anything to run without chopping sound or gaming in slow motion.

After some digging on the Steam support site I discovered the myriad of launch options you can set when you start games.  When deciding which option to enable I noticed that in the video options for Portal, my Hardware DirectX level was only detected as being DirectX 8.  That seemed a little low for my Nvidia 8800 GTS video card, so I launched Portal using the launch option "-dxlevel 90" and everything was right as rain.  Inspecting the video options in Portal showed that my Hardware DirectX level was DirectX 9.  Imagine that.

If you're having a similar problem running The Orange Box in Windows XP give that a try.  Good luck.