OK, now things get stranger and stranger.
On Monday, I played the original Deus Ex for hours. It worked completely fine.
On Tuesday morning, I tried to load Deus Ex (from the Start shortcut). The Sold Out splash screen came up and my DVD drive whirred a bit, but then nothing happened. It hanged. The Task Manager indicates that DeusEx.exe is running and consuming 7,124K, but this number doesn't increase (like, for at least 20 mins) and nothing happens.
I try uninstalling everything, HDTP and DX, and reinstalling only the original from CD again. I notice one thing: during the installation/WinZip extraction, at the very end of the process, a number of short messages come up which have this format:
'File C:\Program Files\Deus Ex\System\Core.u (for example) already exists. Overwrite file?
- Yes - No - Cancel'
The filenames go through a list of .u System ones alphabetically, like from ConSys to UWindow. This despite the fact that I'd uninstalled the game beforehand, so I knew there was no file to overwrite? Right?
The first reinstallation attempt, I just answer 'Yes' each time.
But the game doesn't work; exact same result again.
I've tried:
1) Not choosing those overwrite options during installation
2) Only installing the system files to disk, leaving all else to load from CD
3) Installing everything except DirectX 7
4) Trying to load the game from the original .exe file or from the CD instead of shortcuts
But the result is the same every time: the .exe starts up, but then stagnates at a certain memory usage from 7-9000K and nothing happens.
Could this have anything to do with HDTP? I just want the original game running again now