The three times I've attempted installing 1.29f, Civ3 crashes and I have to reinstall the vanilla shell. Wtf?

Same here. The 1.29 patch never worked for me. There is a glitch of some type. I think it was that there is an added security thing to prevent piracy. It looks for a registry file on the CD- unfortunately, the CD has no such file! You can send a message to Firaxis and hope to recieve a thing that will let you play without a CD, find one to download off the internet, or simply not install patch 1.29.

When you start the game, what version does it say that it is (main menu, lower left-hand corner). Recent releases don't require patching.