Return of Reckoning

Im forcing my friend to start playing RoR with me and he says he has a dark screen and buttons visible on the character selection screen. He supposedly tried every existing way( existing on forum) to fix it, mainly using cmd, but no success there. I said to him to post here so he can finally fix it but it seems he is resistant. Any ideas on how to fix it?

I have many ideas, posted both in the sticky linked above, and the install instructions that are pretty specific or it doesn't work. This isn't an easy game to install for some people.

well my friend downloaded the game thru browser, and after trying few things he finally broke and downloaded it thru torrents. It works. weird