Cactus Crashing in D2 Root

I'm trying to run Cactus on Windows 11 (which I understand is not supported). I set it up by:
- Installing D2 1.00
- Copying the contents of 1. Filesinto C:\Program Files (x86)\Diablo 2\
- Run Cactus.exe

The splash screen runs, but when I click "Enter Sanctuary" it sits there for a minute on a white screen, then crashes. Strangely, when I run Cactus outside of the D2 root (e.g. from where I extracted the .7z), it runs without any problems. I ran both installers that Cactus shipped with, and they both said I was already up to date on those libraries.

I understand that Cactus isn't supported on Win11, but is there some way to capture logs/errors before it crashes? I suspect that it's cranky about some configuration issue, but can't tell what the problem is when it just whitescreen->closes.

You can try running Cactus in admin mode since you are running it inside a Windows protected location. Additionally after installing D2 you should delete any files not required and make the directory look like the recommended layout in the cactus instructions. It may work without doing this but for best results it’s better to only include what’s necessary.

As you mentioned, Windows 11 isn’t supported so support will be limited. Also the next version of Cactus will be Linux only so I would recommend thinking about switching to Linux in the long term.