here’s a frustrating topic that is mentioned in many a forum posts. without some tweaking dungeon keeper 2 will crash about every 5 minutes worth of gameplay under windows 7 or vista.

i ultimately got it functional after trying an assortment of suggestions found on the internet.

playable settings (for me at least – windows 7 pre-sp1):
windows settings
compatibility mode = windows 98/windows me
256 colors
disable visual themes
disable desktop composition
run this program as an administrator

make the DKII.exe file an exception for Data Execution Prevention (DEP) – *probably the most important setting*

DK2 settings
qsound disabled
resolution 800×600
graphics options = high
shadow detail = 0
water translucency, environment mapping, & hardware acceleration all disabled
direct3d – primary display driver

i can’t really say that i know for a fact that all these settings are necessary. i just know that the game became considerably more stable with these specified settings. after the game became playable i didn’t dare alter the settings any further. i probably spent a couple of hours messing around with this, but hey DK2 is a great game and it was worth it to play it again.

one minor note: these settings didn’t make the game uncrashable. i experienced 1 crash out of 20 gameplay attempts, so basically game crashes became quite rare. i still saved often out of nervousness. i was able to finish the game from start to finish with these settings. however, there’s no guarantee that they will work for everyone.