Hey everyone, I have a really wired problem.. Since I installed the DirectX 9 SDK December Update (had October before) Direct3DCreate9 takes 2 or 10 seconds (debug or retail) and CreateDevice takes _several minutes_ to return (but they don't fail - if you wait long enough you get a completely functional direct3d device)! This appears also with a simple test program that does nothing than creating a device and the _precompiled_ DirectX SDK sample executables are also affected by this problem. dxdiag reports no problems. After removing and reinstalling december update it worked one time but after the next reboot the problem was there again. Removing the whole sdk and reinstalling only the october update (which caused no problems) resulted in the same behaviour. I'm really becoming desperate here because I can't program anything until this problem is solved so I'm looking forward for any hints you can give me. Thanks! p.s. Microsoft Windows XP Pro MS Visual Studio 2003 Academic and executables I compiled run fine on other computers. p.p.s.: All drivers are up-to-date, I have an ATI Radeon 9600 XT. p.p.p.s.: I also tried it with the retail (non-debug) release of directx. Same problem.

Sometimes if you switch on "Enable unmanaged debugging" in the project settings you might find that you get this problem/scenario where Direct3D takes it's time to initialize. Look in your project settings under Configuration properties -> Debugging -> Enable Unmanaged Debugging = false and then try again.

I hope this helps.
Take care.