Huh. I'm still not getting any text, but I had no memory leaks this time. No clue why it stopped.

May as well throw in my ninja last-second-edit I made on the bottom of the last page:
I did some research, and I found one other person who was using a program VERY similar to OS for Halo PC, who had encountered the same "missing text" problem.

Unfortunately, he fixed it by getting a new video card/reformatting.
All my efforts to reinstall DirectX have failed. Every time, DirectX gives me a message saying that there is a newer or equivalent copy of DirectX installed. While that IS true, there is an equivalent copy installed, it's one which possibly has some broken files. DirectX eradicator thinks I'm running Vista when I'm really running XP with some modifications made to some system files (Something called Vistamizer), so I can't uninstall DirectX.

I think I've found what the hell I did to cause it, as well.
I was one of the first to jump onto the OS thread with this computer, before people explained I needed to put the d3d9.dll into my CE folder. Well, actually, I did put it into my CE folder, but the init.txt caused it to exception. But I didn't know that was what caused it, so I moved the d3d9 into my system32 folder, backing up the original and replacing it.
Now, Windows isn't letting me overwrite it with the backup, even though it was totally fine with me fucking it up in the first place. So I need to be able to delete that d3d9, overriding Windows' "protection" of the DirectX files, so I could reinstall the backup.