I downloaded the Pharaoh's Curse demo, and it crashes on startup. The screen switches to black, then switches back with an error of "Unable to set graphics mode".

I am using a Dell Mobile Precision M50, with an nVidia Quadro4 GoGL card. I have DirectX 8.1 installed.

A reboot seems to have fixed it.

If a reboot was all it took to fix the problem, it sounds like there must have been something else wrong on the system that caused the game to crash... not an unusual experience if Windows has been running for a while.

That was my conclusion as well. I'm using XP, which has been fairly stable thus far, but I had been doing some DirectX programming and running my modeler software, so something probably just got confused on the video card.

Seems reasonable... I use WinXP Pro and still have to reboot at least every few days if I do any kind of development work. While not doing development work though, I can often go for weeks without rebooting.