I am a fan of DelphiX. I have found it very easy to use. But effectivly I use a very small subset of the available components:

DXDraw
DXImageList
DXSound
DXWaveList (?)

Now I have heard that there are compatibility issues with DelphiX. A number of more modern machines do not like DelphiX particularly much. Even some older machines have problems such as my Windows ME machine (doesn't like the transparancy stuff) and also a couple of my friends have not been able to run my games as they get initialization errors. I also would like to start using alphadraw functionality which DelphiX is not very good at. 3D functionality is not required as I cannot do modelling but have a good sprite library available.

I dislike the Sprite Engine that DelphiX has as I find it very restricitve. Each game I basically write my own Sprite Engine and Gui Engine as such the Sprite Engine of any tool is irrelevant. I would like to make use of DirectMusic (or equivilent) in my games.

As I want to create games that can easily be run by the majority of casual gamers I specifically want to avoid DirectX 9 so the component library must be DirectX 8.1 or OpenGL based.

What set of components would you suggest I use? Please give specific reasons why you think the component set will fit my requirements.

I have looked at GameVision SDK but it didn;t run and has now been ported to DirectX 9.
I looked at Omega a while ago and the DXDraw equivilent component continually crashed my Program (with nothing except initialisation code).