I purchased two copies of DS II, and am trying to initiate LAN play between
the two machines (separated by a 3-Com 10/100 switch). Everything works up to
the point of actually launching the server to host the game (staging area,
game setup, single-player, etc.) at which point the guest machine shows the
server starting (but stays in the staging area) and the server switches to a
black screen with only the mouse pointer working. Seems to be consistent and
re-installation did not affect it. This happens regardless of which machine
hosts (the host machine is the one that locks up on the black screen of
doom). The machine is not frozen, you can alt-tab out and kill DS II.

Windows Firewall is disabled and oddly, Each machine can join/play an
internet (already hosted) games just fine. Not really interested in that
aspect, we bought it really for LAN play. The machines are both Windows XP
SP2, DirectX 9.0c, 1 GB ram. I have applied the 2.1 patch (hoping against
hope) but this didn;t really change the symptoms any,