I've just installed Civ3 on my laptop and upgraded to 1.29f. WinXP sp1. I have this on my main PC as well. WinXP SP2. It works just fine there. On the laptop, the intro video plays fine, and the opening screen appears. The buttons on the right side are OK, but the copyright text at the bottom of the screen is scrambled. Selecting a new game or scenario causes a program crash.

The Civ3 support site has an issue with text scrambling and other errors. They suggest removing extra fonts or just certain LUCIDIA fonts. I did the latter. Hey! Civ3 worked. The copyright text was correct and a new game was started. That was last week. Today, the fonts are back (I don't know why) and Civ3 is crashing. Removing the LUCIDIA fonts has no effect. Civ3 is crashing.

The debugger shows a divide by 0 error.

Help me Obi Wan Kenobi. You are my last hope.

Well. I started over. Again. Uninstalled Civ3. Removed the Civ3 directory and any left over contents. Installed Civ3. Updated to 1.29f. All is well.

Go figure.