The same programs work fine on my laptop (which, ironically, has no 3D acceleration hardware), and the D3DXInitialize() call works fine, so I'm thinking the D3DX library still need some debugging by Microsoft. It bums me out, because I really wanted to use it.

-Evil

No such luck. It's still exploding with the same invalid page faults.

NONE of the DirectX 7 D3DX utility library examples will run. They crash hard whether I'm using the retail or debug files.

I recompiled and debugged one of them to find that the problem lies in the calls to D3DXGetDeviceCount(). This function causes unhandled exceptions. Anyone else seeing this with a TNT board?

I found that if I completely disable the ATI graphics board in the registry, the D3DX samples now run.

I'm going to report this as a bug to MS.