PS Unable to load, crashes/lag

[Trevelar]

Hello everyone! I have been reading through the posts here trying to find a solution to my problem and was unable to find a similar circumstance so here goes.

The Problem: Planetside crashes between the launcher and the server select screen. After clicking the play button in the launcher the game begins to initialize and my desktop appears, then a black screen. You can hear the game music playing in the background. Sometimes instead of a completely black screen I get the first frame or two of the Sony logo animation. The mouse cursor is available and super lagged. Sometimes the system crashes at this point and at other times I can use the window key to exit and then reboot.

The Stats: Windows XP Home Edition SP 1 (all updates installed), Intel Pentium 4 CPU 1.8 ghz, 512MB RAM, DirectX 9.0b (4.09.0000.0902), Dual displays on an ATI Radeon 9000 pro (128 MB) with Omega drivers (version 2.5.30). All planetside files are intact and updated, connecting via Cable with no firewall and no connection sharing.

What I Have Tried: Multiple uninstall/reinstall of planetside, multiple uninstall reinstall of Direct X & Sony's suggested ATI drivers, changing monitor refresh rates, disabling secondary display. Complete reinstalation of windows (thought maybee some of my tweaks could have caused the problem), the current Omega driver and a few older ATI drivers. Ran spyware/adware remover.

Occasionaly (3 times), the game will start and I can play with no problems. This happened first when I installed Sony's suggested drivers. But when I logged off and tried to log back on it pulled the standard black screen crash. It also loaded sucesfully after changing the refresh rate of my primary monitor. Again worked fine for one session then back to crashing. And the 3rd successful load was after the windows reinstall, but again only worked for one session of play. Since reinstalling windows everytome I want to play is not an option you guys have any suggestions?? Any help would be greatly appreciated