Having just read your post and especially the word "laptop", it somehow "clicked". A few days ago I had quite some trouble getting SH3 work together with the War Ace Campaign 4.1 mod and the symptoms you described are very much the same. They usually occur on laptops or other systems with widescreen displays, and from what I read your laptop display uses a native resolution of 1920x1200 - meaning 16:10 format. I myself am running on an Acer Aspire 8940G with a 16:9 resolution of 1920x1080.
The problem you describe has nothing to do with any kind of protection but rather with the fact that SH3 was natively made for 4:3 resolutions and therefore has some problems with modern displays which mostly use widescreen resolutions.
As far as I was able to find out,there are the following ways to fix this issue:
- lowering the anti aliasing setting to less than 4x
- and/or
- switching anti aliasing transparency to "multisample" in your nvidia settings
WAC 4.1 for example is so very much resistant to any widescreen resolution that I have to run it in height-scaled 4:3 mode with black bars on the left and right.
If you are using mods like GWX however, using MaGui or any other widescreen GUI could do the job since they usually also include a widescreen patch in order to have the 3D scenes of the game displayed in a proper aspect ratio (usually fitted to 16:9 resolutions, but should also work on 16:10).
In any case, try a right click on the sh3.exe in your windows explorer (or whatever filemanager you're using) and choose "properties". Then check the version number on the details page. It should read "1.4.0.1" - if it doesn't get the latest patch (1.4b) from the SubSim database and of course don't forget the 4GB patch for your version - here the link:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/down...p?do=cat&id=56
That
should fix it - at least it did on my laptop. WAC 4.1 seems to be a special case though.
Hope this helps, regards from Kiel,
Hess