Civ IV wont start up

I dont know if this has been posted before, but if it has, oh well

anyway, i just bought the Civ IV GOTY edition yesterday and i installed it and it started up, and all just fine, and the tutorial worked also, then, it got late and i decided to shut this comp down for the night, so when i start the comp up this morning, and then try to start the game up, it goes to the beginning screen where it says "loading" in abotu a half-dozen languages, it hangs there for 2 or 3 min, then one of those error windows pops up "Sin Meier's Civilization 4 has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconcenience."
i've tried the Autorun and i've tried the shortcut, and i've tried the start menu, and none of it works (it came updated to 161 by the way)

all my hardware exceeds the recommended requirements, but to help, i've uploaded my dxdiag just in case it's needed


EDIT: i decided to see if a reinstall will fix it, after all, i've only done the tutorial

*bump and update*

the reinstall didn't work, afterwards, i attempted to uninstall and got this error:


Afterwards, i fixed it by following first instructions in the post by petek in this thread and it allowed me to uninstall via add and remove programs

after I reinstalled, even though it was the GOTY edition and came patched to 1.61, i re-downloaded the 1.61 patch and tried to install it and i got this error
that error still persists

My brother installed it on his computer and it works fine; he's had absolutely no problems with it.

However, i did do one thing he didn't: We picked up Space Rangers 2 from the bargain bin on the same day. As some of you may know, this game has StarForce, and i've heard some bad things about that. I installed and played Civ 4 before i installed SR2; Civ 4 did not start giving me problems until after i installed SR2. I'm thinking that StarForce might conflict with whatever copy protection Civ4 has; anybody know for sure if it does? thanks in advance

nevermind, i figured it out with my brother's help. The problem was my DVD drive. Appearently Safedisc 4 doesn't like certain DVD drives, my DVD drive is one of them. So, my brother came up with an idea stemming off of research he did from other places about problems like mine. He ripped me an image of disc one, then got me daemon tools, and voila, it works like normal.