Trouble starting my FF7 PC game...

Note: I am not using the Ultima Edition.

Well, FF8 works just fine on my comp, but FF7 is absolutely refusing to work. I installed it, along with DirectX, DirectShow, and the Yamaha MIDI thing (I already have the latest version of DirectX, but I didn't think it would hurt), I applied the 1.02 patch and the Chocobo patch, and...

...

After the Eidos logo flashes on-screen, the whole thing crashes. Sometime the logo doesn't even appear. ONE TIME, I got to the New Game screen, but it crashed as soon as selected "New Game". I installed the correct codec, made sure it was loading from the right drive (I looked in regedit and everything), and no dice. I have no idea what to do. Any help?

Are you running it on XP or Vista? I ran it on XP a looooooooong time ago... It didn't run on instilation, so I just threw every single patch at it and hoped for the best. That didn't work, so I reinstalled it and tried starting it up again without any of the patches applied and it worked fine all of a sudden. :confused:

Yeah, I'm running it on XP. I also tried it completely unpatched, and no dice.

did you try setting the exe to Win95/98 compatability mode?

Yes, I tried that, too. The torrent readme said to uninstall codecs. Which codecs am I supposed to uninstall? Do they interfere with the movies?