If you have any sound blaster card you will need to turn hardware acceleration off completely or the game will crash. Another issue with Windows XP is sound support. (You need to do this before actually starting game play.) Under the Processes tab select the Thief.exe and right click. You can get around this: When at the menu screen, alt-tab out of the game and launch the task manager. 'The Thief games nor System Shock 2 support hyper-threading under Windows XP, IOW after starting the game you will suddenly crash to desktop.
