Scenario's refuse to load and break program

OS: Windows XP SP 3 (32 bit system here)
Game Version: Civ Chronicles 2 with patch installed
Note these are 3 seperate message boxes calling up a M$ Visual C++ dialog box with 3 options: Abort, Retry(Debug), & Ignore. There is no JIT debugger installed so debugger fails.


Then it crashes the game. Notably this only happens after it goes through ruler select and such. Random New game works fine however.
Pops this error up after the rest:

Unhandled Win32 exception has occured in civ2.exe [7128]

Click to expand...

Ok, additional wierdness. The crash is specific to the version of Civ 2 MGE that shipped with Civ chronicles.

Strange as it sounds: this might be an issue of too long file paths. I've noticed the "Best of Net" scenarios constantly crashing on my Winows Vista PC. On my XP notebook (with exactly the same file path!) everything works perfectly. I also noticed with the SANTA scenario that the white landscape graphics won't load properly, everything looks like an unmodded game and as soon as I try to move a unit or enter and leave a city screen the game crashes. So it basically looks like a problem loading all the related scenario files. With that in mind the solution was easily found: as soon as the SANTA folder is moved from the BESTNET2 folder to the SCENARIO folder everything works just fine...