Thats because xp already has the latest version of directx pre-installed

I've had DX9 installed for months.. Raised my 3DMark2001 score 10 or 20 points compared to 8.1... Everything works just fine since it's backwards compatible. Microsoft sure is slow these days. Rich and lazy. Win2k SP3? How many years have they been working on that? SP1 for XP? A new version of IE? DX9?

Before that new version of 3DMark, I had to edit the registry to make 3DMark think I was running DX8: Alter this in Registry to Change the name of DX .. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftDirectX Alter the "Version" to read "4.08.01.0810" 4.09.00.0080