Thank you for your response.
I know I probably sound like an idiot, but I don't think any of those apply to my situation =/
I'm getting the following error when I try to run the game.exe:
"the application was unable to start correctly 0xc0000142"
I'm running Windows 7 64-bit, so the above graphical issues do not apply.
Every time a loader doesn't work, I start with a fresh unzip, and start from scratch.
EDIT
OK I finally got it. I didn't consider the "application was unable to start correctly 0xc0000142 error" as a crash, lol.
deleting the dsound.dll worked. I'm getting an I/O error now, but I think I can fix that lol.
Thanks for your responses and patience all!