Windows XP and that DAMN NVIDIA opengl32.dll

well after looking at these boards and several others, i have realized that no one has a fool proof method of fixing the opengl32.dll error (the one where half-life and such cannot initialize opengl32.dll). I know that several people do not even have this bug, it all depends on luck i guess…

However I found this information which works all the time, yet is still a temporary, time consuming fix.

Credit goes to ZAH on the Dell support forums:

"OpenGL will not work for any application. This is because (pretty sure) “nvoglnt.dll” is not being loaded into memory when or before the applications run. “Opengl32.dll” is being called, and it cannot function completely without nVidia’s dll in memory (I think).

Why do I think this? Because of a very strange workaround-fix I came up with:

Thinking the problem was related to “opengl32.dll”, I located the version that existed before SP1. Booting into safe mode and replacing it, did not solve the problem (yes, I made backup copies of the original). I tried copying “nvoglnt.dll” to “opengl32.dll” in the remote chance that might do it. No, that gave worse errors about the dll being wrong (of course it would). BUT when I replaced the correct “opengl32.dll”, without rebooting, OpenGL works perfectly!!

So, I am lead to believe that “nvoglnt.dll” is not loading into memory correctly (??? - I’m not a programmer)"

oops sorry that information is kind of worded confusingly… basically you boot into safe mode, cut the opengl32.dll out of the system32 folder… then reboot into normal windows and after your computer finishes booting up copy the opengl32.dll back int the system32 folder.

This seems to work all the time, which leads to the question, why does winxp’s opengl32.dll prevent nvoglnt.dll from loading into memory?~