A couple nights ago, I decided to reinstall Thief 3: Deadly Shadows and give it another spin. The only catch: I’m running Windows Vista, and old games can be very iffy on this OS.

My problem was that after installing, any time I tried to run the game, I got the following error:

(Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library)
Runtime Error!
Program: C:\Program Files\Thief – Deadly Shadows\System\t3.exe
abnormal program termination

When this happened, the cursor would get stuck as a spinning CD, which normally indicates that the computer is accessing the CD. Only this time, it would stay that way until I restarted the machine. I don’t think I could open the CD tray either.

After a few hours of mucking about, I finally got the thing to run, even though some parts are a bit buggy. I figured I’d share all the steps I took to get it to run in Vista. I’m fairly sure that not all of these steps were necessary, but I’ll list everything I did just in case.

1- First, I should mention that I’ve had UAC turned off for a long time now. I never had any trouble with malware in XP, and the UAC was actually preventing me from running a lot of my software, besides being very annoying. According to this page, it’s important that if you turn UAC off, you do it before installing the game. If you’re installing the game, you might also find this tweak guide useful.

2- After installing, I downloaded and ran the Thief Deadly Shadows v1.1 patch.

3- I don’t think that this is any part of the fix, but I downloaded and installed John P.’s Thief Deadly Shadows texture pack.

4- I downloaded and implemented the no CD patch. I don’t feel guilty about it, since I legally purchased the game and I’m just trying to get it to work.

5- I right-clicked t3.exe, visited the compatibility tab, and set it to XP(SP2) compatibility mode. This was actually one of the first things I tried, but by itself it didn’t fix my problem. In the end, this step didn’t even matter for me, since I used the no cd exe rather than this one, and I haven’t set any compatibility on the no-cd exe.

6- Here’s one I put off until the end because I was hoping not to have to do it. I disabled DEP. Following the instructions in this forum thread, I went to a command prompt, typed bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff, and rebooted.

7- Lastly, when I actually run the game, I right click the no cd exe and pick “run as administrator”. Yeah, it’s a pain to do it this way, but the game runs. I should re-emphasize that I don’t have compatibility set for this exe, not that I’m sure whether that matters.

Here’s the other quirky thing. During every loading screen, this error pops up.

Every time a loading screen pops up, the machine goes back to the desktop and I see the error again. When this happens, don’t go within five feet of the mouse or keyboard. Just step away. The game will continue. The one time I clicked OK on the message, the game crashed. If you don’t touch anything, the game should continue normally.

Hopefully, this article helps someone else get the game running on Vista. It’s a heck of a pain, but Thief: Deadly Shadows is a great game, so it’s worth it.