Error: non-existing surface?

The game is Alice's Magical Mahjong, it has been working on this system for years. Suddenly it has display issues; on starting there is the normal small splash screen and the music starts playing, it fades to black, but instead of the main menu appearing the screen stays black with the music playing. Task Manager shows it as running, but I must use TM to kill it.
The error log shows:

"ERROR in
action number 1
of Begin Step Event
for object obj_controller_screen_transition_out_2:

Trying to use non-existing surface."

Researching this online gets specific references to other games (with solutions not relevant to this game; for example, there's no .dat file to delete) or highly technical discussions on dev sites.

Another issue which I feel is connected. I use a program called FS Repaint for painting aircraft in MS FlightSim, it displays the 3D model of the aircraft as you paint so you can see, real time, the work in 3D. It still runs, I select an aircraft, the progress bar shows it is loading the model, but the render window remains blank. Reinstalling did not help.

Possibly some vid card setting is causing both problems?

If anyone is interested, problem solved. Something had changed three vid driver settings, I returned them to "normal" and all is well.

FWIW, one of the "optimizations" was enabled, I never use those. A setting for "prerendered frames for VR" was enabled, I don't even have VR. A "fast" option for Vsync was enabled. Disabled all three; no idea which one, or combination of them, caused the problem, and too lazy to fiddle with settings again to find out.