problem with second time running

Yesterday I installed civ 2 on a windows 7 computer. I did the update. I installed the patch. It worked perfectly.
I tried starting it up again this morning and it behaves exactly the way it did before I installed the patch yesterday. (3 separate windows. 2 of them just black. 1 with the civ background. Nothing working right.) Just on the off chance that it might make a difference I tried running the patch again. no change. I tried a reboot and load again. no change.
Any ideas short of trying a fresh install?

Forgot to mention. This is MGE.
Only thing I can think to try right now is reinstalling.

Reinstall/update/patch did not help.

Ahhahahaha So I tried using the windows reverse compatibility feature. Right click the icon. Select properties. Select compatibility. Tell it windows xp and it worked perfectly. Strange that it worked last night without doing that but wouldn't work today until I did that.