An old Civ fan on vacation here. Bought c3c with the intention of not leaving my hotel room for the week. Can't get it installed and I'm about to cry. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Here's what's happening and what I know.

The big problem. I get through game setup and start with my little guy, ready to conquer the world, except, we're frozen. Sound still comes through, but nothing in the game is responsive. Just before it locks up, is the info screen telling you about your chosen culture and the goodies it comes with. That works fine. But as soon as I move past that screen, nothing. Only thing I can do is control-alt-del out and look at task manager. Civ is running, but so is a process called ~e5.0001 which keeps getting bigger and bigger.

An interesting note, on first start of the game, it doesn't. Splash screen comes up with Civ 3 logo, then nothing. On second start of game, it comes up, and I get as far as discussed above. Could be related, might not be.

I'm running a Dell Laptop, D600, plenty of horses and mem. video card in Radeon mobility 9000 and I've tried to update the driver, no help. Same with audio, updated driver, no help. I've tried a uninstall and reinstall, no help. Tried to set the refresh in an ini (not sure I knew what I was doing, but no help.

Help - my vacation is on the line.

Thanks.

Jay

Still not working. I forgot to mention I'm on XP Pro. I've also tried to kil all third party apps and run civ on a stripped down boot up. Still no luck. no matter what I do that ~e5.0001 file still keeps sucking up memory according to task manager and seems to be the culprit.

Any ideas?

It's raining here and I'm really supposed to be playing Civ right now...