I have been playing SS2 for well over a 2 weeks, and it was working fine, now i load it today and the screen is much smaller, boxed in on the sides with black bars, and the intro and credits blink a black page and return me to the menue.

What is going on? I have windows 8.

never seen that happening before, but patching up to the latest version via ss2tool is always a good start. see the sticky topic.