Bought COD 5 on tuesday night, installed it, and it crashed the first time i went to play.
Dell XPS 1710, Geforce 7950 GTX, 2.33 ghz, 4gb ram...
ok, reinstalled yesterday, but nothing helped.
Downloaded the patch - 1.1. I have sigmatel audio maybe that? nope
Updated to the LATEST latest Direct X drivers. Nope
Heard people had trouble with SP2 on the beta, Fine.. ill update... SP3? Nope

What the heck!!

COD 4 runs beautifully, why is COD 5 giving me such problems??

By updating to the latest DX drivers...what do you mean exactly? Did you dl and run the dxwebsetup.exe application from Microsoft?

You should try updating your NVidia graphics drivers to the latest.

I was playing the demo on my desktop with XP SP3 no problems but I've heard of people having various troubles. There could be a compatibility issue with some other programs running in the background. You can try shutting them down to isolate the problem.

i did d/l DXwebsetup, but it says it cant download any files - even though the web works fine. I d/led the newest distrubutable..
Also i updated to the newest Nvidia drivers with Mobility Modder..
I could try shutting down all the tray programs

I installed it today and it simply wouldn't run. As soon as I launched it I would get a Windows error and quit. That was in Vista SP1.

I uninstalled it and rebooted into XP Pro SP3 and installed it and all is fine. Works great. I am using the same Nvidia drivers (177.92) in both installs on the same machine.

This is why I haven't abandoned XP, it's always been more reliable for me. It seems just when I start to cave and figure I can use Vista more something like this happens and slams me right back to XP.

yeah mine doesnt run in XP - I could try Vista, but i dont know if it would help...

If you have Vista it's worth a try. You're not the only one who's having this problem. I'm thinking there's something running in my Vista install that's common to your XP install but is missing from my XP install.

I installed it on my laptop today with XP Pro and it also works great.

I think you're best bet is to disable your various optional software until you find the culprit. Can you start COD5 in safe mode?