Jenny I'm not sure just what the problem was. I've no way to see just what is within the UE3Redist.exe file.
The strange thing is my system has two hard drives. One is configured as a dual boot drive (C:\) and I can select either Win98SE or WinXP SP3. Booting from the second drive (D:\) just gives WinXP SP3.
After the redistribution package was installed, I could not boot into WinXP from the dual boot drive; "HAL.DLL corrupt or missing" error. Booting from the second drive worked but as WinXP is installed only on the second drive, something weird must have happened. This behavior was reproducible.
Using a Restore point corrected the boot problem but as that was several days old, other files needed to be re-updated.
Just to make the above clearer, here is the boot.ini from drive1.
[Boot Loader]
Timeout=0
Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[Operating Systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
C:\="Microsoft Windows 98"
Now boot.ini from drive0
[boot loader]
timeout=0
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
I just have 768Megs on my system. My Asus A7V8X-X can use up to 3 GB but I'm not sure if that is PC3200 or faster. I might just see if I can buy any memory locally and experiment. Probably could use a new computer but am not quite ready yet.
The above does not cover all the problems, just the worst. The game, far as I can tell, is supposed to run on a WinXP system even though the DX.dll seems to be from Win7 or more recent. I do have Visual C++ and some Microsoft.NET packages installed.