This was one of the first games I downloaded from GOG back on Feb 28th of this year 2011. When I installed it back then I got it working on my Windows 7 64 bit machine. I decided to uninstall it a few days ago because when I downloaded the latest drivers from Nvidia this game and alot of my other Good Old Games had color distortion (screen was a combination of pink and green on alot of my old games). So I began uninstalling the old games that were affected by this problem which included this one.
Ok , then I decided to roll back the new Nvidia drivers and go to the prior driver offering from Nvidia that I had installed before and voila all my games looked and played great again EXCEPT Arx Fatalis....which I can't get to play at all..... :-(

When I click on the exe or the shortcut to it, I see the little blue circle by the mouse pointer spin for a few seconds and then it just disappears and notthing happens........ When I press ctrl/alt/del I can see arx fatlis.exe running on my machine so all I can do is press stop process.

I have tryed all the compatibility modes and nothing seems to work for me this time.
Anyone know a solution for this i can try?

Are you running it as administrator? If not, try that and see if it works. You can also try installing somewhere OTHER than Program Files.

Also, there was actually a patch to Arx Fatalis not too long ago by the original developers. GOG has updated the game to the latest version, but if you're still using the same installer that you originally downloaded a while back, you might still have the old version. The patch supposedly helps with video issues on modern graphics cards, among other things. So you might want to re-download the game from GOG to make sure you have the latest version, and then see if that works.

The official patch also made the game engine open source, and so there's been a fanmade patch to help performance on modern machines too. It's discussed in the sticky thread in the Arx Fatalis forum here on GOG. You could try applying that patch as well to see if it helps.

Thanks Waltorious for your suggestions. I gave all you said a go but no luck,,, I sent GOG support a request but they have not responded to me.... Infact they have not EVER responed to any request I have made to them for help or support.

I am wondering if there is something in the ini thats keeping the game from properly launching on my computer?

ugh, yeah i just purchased this game, and having the same problem. win7 64bit. i click on it, and nothing happens.... lov gog, but there are a lot of issues with too many games it seems

strange everything works fine by me and i got win 7 64 bit

Yeah there must be something else going on for those of you who can't run the game. For the OP, it seems it might have been related to the graphics drivers from Nvidia, but rolling them back to what they used to be should have worked.

Are you sure you installed the game exactly the way you did before? Same install location? Anything else on your computer changed between the time the game was working and now? Also, make sure that when you install the game you are running the installer as administrator.

I have noticed that if i install the game outside program files i have less trouble