for several months have been playing Civ3 1.29 on my office computer xp pro and integrated intel video as well as home computer ME with nvidia 64 card. I just installed xp pro as operating system and now Civ won't work. I found somewhere on these forums the exact same problem: opening video o.k., set up screen (terrain, climate, etc) o.k. but when I try to start, screen flashes and I am back to desktop. I have uninstallled and reinstalled multiple times. I have unistalled video drivers and reinstalled. I have downloaded all xp updates. I even tried loading ME video driver.
Don't know what else to try.
Help would be appreciated greatly.

Should also add that game plays fine on laptop with win98 and integrated video. I have a pentium 3 processor and 526mb ram and 32mb video ram.

Well, I have XP and run with no problems. Did you install XP over the top of ME -> that might have been your problem :(

Do any other programs have problems? (especially ones that use directx?) You have reinstalled the video driver, but have you got the latest version?

I did a complete clean install of winxp and dowloaded the latest drivers. I downloaded all of the winxp undates.
Still no luck.

I have also cleaned out all background programs using msconfig

Can you tell us what your Video card details are?

Can you go into 'system' and make sure that all hardware is installed and operating correctly (no yellow exclamation makrs).

using device manager shows everything working fine. video card is nvidia riva tnt 64. (32mb). The opening movie is fine. Incidentally, don't know if this is important , but when I get to set up screen the fonts on the right (start game, load game, load scenario, etc) are not exactly the same as when the game worked.

There were some font issues fixed in one fo the patches -> have you got the latest patch?

The other suggestion from tech support was to remove all fonts with the word 'lucida' in them. However, this shouldn't cause a crash (just strange text). :hmm:

Does the intro sound work OK?

intro movie and sound work fine. have direct x 9b