Civ3 Complete "Blank Screen" on Vista via Steam

Ok, got bored of playing Civ 2, so just bought and d/l Civ 3 Complete via Steam.

Installs fine.

Go to load it up and all i get is a black screen. Thats it. It doesnt get any further and I end up having to use Task Manager to get back to the desktop.

I've looked through the forums and found similar if not the same problems here, here, here, here and here.

Basically I was wondering if anyone had found or know of a way to fix this issue. One forum I visited had a post on it saying that the user had phoned 2K games support and they'd said that it would never work on Vista. I can't verify this as i cant find a UK number or even an email for 2K

Steam lists the recommended OS as 98/ME/2000/XP with associated compatible video and sound cards plus DirectX 9.0b or higher, which makes me think that it should work on Vista.

Another post suggests downgrading to XP - a) i wouldnt know where to start off doing something like that, and b) the upgrade cost me £99 so I want my money's worth!

Another post suggests making sure you have the latest video drivers - my machine is just under a year and a half old so I would have thought I'd have nearly the latest but I cant find my video card on nVidia's site.

For info, I'm running Vista Home Premium, with a AMD 64 X2 TL-50 mobile chip, nVidia Geforce Go 7600 Video card with DirectX10

Help would be much appreciated as I've otherwise just wasted £15ish quid on something that I cant use without hauling my huge desktop machine around.

Well, I'm running Civ 3, PTW, and Conquests on Vista without any issues at all. I have all of the individual disks as well as Complete from Civilization Chronicles. But... thats on my laptop.

On my desktop (running Vista), everything worked fine until I updated my drivers and enabled SLI (2 x 7900 GT). Thats when I started getting the exact same problem - Civ 3 loads and you get audio but the entire screen is black. My problem was worse though, when I went to task manager the screen stayed black, and I would have reset the computer. Even weirder is that the 7xxx series cards have hardware support up to DX 9.0c, and it still didn't work.

I fixed it by rolling the drivers back to 169.09 (i think). I ran it this way for a while, until I realized that I really only need Civ 3 on one computer (i'm the only one in my house who plays it). I needed newer drivers for Crysis, Bioshock and CoD4 anyways, so I uninstalled Civ 3. Easy solution for me I guess. By the way, I'm running the 174.31 driver right now on my laptop (running Vista) with a 8600M GT, DX 10 , and everything works fine, including CivAssist II.

I don't even get that.

All i get is a blank screen and a windows error message saying "Civ3Complete has stopped working"