Strangest thing... as soon as I click yes to punkbuster, I find myself looking at my desktop. Any ideas?

You are the third MOB person to have this problem. Dirty Harry and Shift were the other two. It appears that one of the XFIRE upgrades had a dll conflict COD2. I think the solution was to reinstall COD2.

Old Man Mike

i just had that problem too, i think i updated punkbuster also, but i forgot, maybe its in a post somewhere.
i found it, just go a page back, i don't know how to copy and past links

Yep, I had that exact same problem.

A complete reinstall of CoD2 fixed it

or you can go into the config.cfg and change it manually and then start it