A long while ago, I bought the Orange Box for my PC. I had heard glowing reviews of Portal, and the fact that it came with three of the Half Life games and TF2 was a nice bonus as well. However, upon firing it up, Half-Life 2 didn't work. At the time, I didn't press the matter because it was the middle of the school year and I didn't really have the time, and Portal worked fine (and it was the reason I bought the game), so I wasn't too concerned. However, all my attempts to make it work (updating my video drivers, lowering graphic textures, etc) did nothing, in fact, they seemed to worsen the issue. I left it for the longest time, not dwelling on it.

However, recently, I got it into my head to try and fix the issue. In the game's current state, after I started a new game, it would crash to the desktop. It would also set my resolution ridiculously low and not let me adjust it until I restarted my computer. This gave me cause to believe it was some problem with my video card or driver, but I couldn't be sure and didn't want to tamper with anything lest I screw more things up.

I decided that the easiest way to try and make this work was to e-mail Steam support with some screenshots of the errors. They'd be able to point me in the right direction. In the interim, I phoned my computer savvy friend, who suggested that something in the game was making my video driver reset. That supported my theory that the issue lay in my video card, but all of my drivers were up-to-date and not corrupted, and I could run other more advanced games anyways (Crysis), so I was a little stuck.

Another person had suggested it might have something to do with my sound card driver being out of date. This avenue ended up not working because there was a corruption in the sound card driver package I downloaded. I decided to focus on my initial suspicion (the video card drivers) instead.

But, suddenly, a solution! I woke up this morning to discover an e-mail from Steam support in my inbox. They suggested setting the game to launch with DirectX 7. Upon doing so, the game worked perfectly. After some texture fiddling and resolution setting, the game runs like a dream. With some help from my friends, I made Half-Life 2 work.

EDIT: Shortly after, the graphics started fouling up again, but