movie hangs game

The intro movie plays. When the first era change movie is called for, a text box opens that says "play era movie", and nothing else happens. The mouse cursor moves, but will not select anything. I don't need the movies. I have tried setting the ini file to "no ingame movies = 1", and have selected "no movies" on the options menu. The same thing happens every time. Civ4, patch 1.76 is in. Does anyone know how to get by this problem? I used to be able to play this game on this computer, but after a hard drive crash that was repaired, this problem appeared. I have re-installed the game with no improvement.