The demo crashes right after I try to logon to gamespy from the main menu.

There are two circumstances where this can happen. In the first circumstance, the user crashes after entering the login credentials and pressing continue. in the second case the crash happens before the login credentials are entered.

If you are crashing after entering credentials, it is because you have illegal characters in your username. You can avoid this crash by using a name that only includes letters and numbers. Don't use spaces, punctuation or any special characters.

If you are crashing before entering your login credentials, then it is because DirectPlay failed to initialize on your system. This issue can usually be fixed by reinstalling DirectX 8.1 (or upgrading to DirectX 8.1).

A future version of Strifeshadow will correctly report these errors instead of crashing.