I've been using some dx9 tutorial/demo apps that use the d3dx9.dll. I got this dll off the net somewhere (d3dx9_27.dll to be exact). This is just a utility library that has some helper functions for D3D apps, like font rendering etc.
Oliver has mentioned that he uses some of the same apps for testing wined3d, which is why I picked them (http://www.codesampler.com/dx9src.htm). However, about half of them call D3DXCreateFont, which always fails on my system. As such, the return font object is null and so the demo crashes shortly afterwards when it tries to call a member function through the null object. All of these demos just try to load the "Arial" font, which seems to be registered. I'm just curious how Oliver, and maybe others, are running these demos if they always crash at startup. The demos do pop up a message box like "D3DXCreateFont: failed!!!" or something like that, and after you click the "OK" button, the app continues anyways, and then crashes soon after. If anyone knows how to get around this font thing I'd very much like to know! Cheers, Aric