Degus,
Sorry. Should have posted this earlier. I found several problems while trying to correct this problem. I found that the GeForce 2 MX/MX440 card was sharing an IRQ with the modem! Check to make sure that your video card is not piggy-backed with any other hardware by going to "START", "ALL PROGRAMS", "ACCESSORIES", "SYSTEM TOOLS","SYSTEM INFORMATION". Once you have that open go to "HARDWARE RESOURCES" Click the "+" sign and then click "IRQ". Make sure that nothing is sharing the IRQ with the video card (that is not video card-related). That being said, my problem turned out to be much more serious in the end... My AGP slot was fried! I used it as an excuse to by a new computer and so solved my problem. However, give the above IRQ test a try. Also, try running other 3D games on your system. The way that I found out that my AGP slot was cooked was by running all my WW2 flight sims on the old card. They all had the exact same fault. If your system ran CMBB and CMBO well and now it runs like ***t, that may be something to look into (the slot the card goes into on your mother board).
One added note; rolling back my drivers to 30.82 (or whatever they were) seemed to help only in the short term. Before long, the whole thing was a mess again. Also, I tried a new graphics card (a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 with 128 meg's of ram) thinking that my old video card was dead. Through all of this I discovered that the AGP slop was gone. I'm not a hardware wizard by any stretch, but I hope this provides some help.
Have you tried going to the troubleshooting section of your video card and turning off various functions in increments? Sometimes this helps to determine if the card is dying, your directX is messed up, etc. Good luck.
2521.