i finally got nba live 2000 running on my pc.
i narrowed it down to two things...
1) I installed live 2000 on a hard drive partition that is FAT32 (not NTFS)
2) Under compatiblity settings for the NBA Live 2000 shortcut, i removed the check mark for "disable visual themes".. i also unchecked all the others as well.
3) the game now runs. this also fixed some other games I was having problems with. Apparently, do not check "disable visual themes" was the final fix.
Note: This worked for me. I hope this works for someone else.
Good Luck!