Civ4 won't start after reinstall - no error

[calum]

I installed Civ4 and played with no problems.
I picked up some adware/spyware and went through a painful process of removing it - installing antivirus, adware/spyware removal, etc.
At some point during the adware/spyware removal Civ4 no longer starts.
The adware/spyware is gone and I've reinstalled Civ4 but it still doesn't start.
When I run Civilisation4.exe it runs briefly (shows an hourglass cursor), but then stops. I don't get an error, and none of the .ini files or folders in My Documents\My Games are created, so I don't get a log file.
I tried running Civilisation4.exe within Visual Studio, but that doesn't give me any clues. Civilisation4.exe exits with code 1 (0x01) immediately after loading C:\WINDOWS\system32\uxtheme.dll.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Calum

 

[Petek]

Perhaps uxtheme.dll was hacked by the adware/spyware? On my system I have an exact copy of the dll in C:\i386. Do you have such a copy and does it match?

 

[YixilTesiphon]

I was having the same problem, except without the reinstall...Now it's telling me I have the wrong CD too, even though reinserting the CD brings up the menu to press "play" on...

 

[calum]

I don't think the problem is uxtheme.dll. I downloaded another uxtheme.dll from the net and it was identical and didn't fix the problem. At one point during the spyware removal I disabled some services, one of which must enabled my DVD. After disabling this service the DVD drive wasn't initialised during bootup so didn't appear. I've since re-enabled these services and the DVD drive is now working as usual. I'm not getting any error when Civ4 fails, it just runs for a second then quietly stops, no error of any kind.

 

[Petek]

It sounds like the adware/spyware hosed something in your OS. If you haven't already done so, you might want to look at the following registry keys for suspicious entries:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServices

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServices

but that probably won't help. Since a format/reinstall of everything is lots of work, you might want to try re-installing Windows on top of the current installation. That doesn't take too much work and might fix the problem.

 

[calum]

I got lucky. I went to the Microsoft Update site and downloaded the latest version of the .Net framework. After doing that Civ4 started to work. Perhaps the adware/spyware or my attempt at removing it hosed my existing .Net framework and upgrading it fixed the problem. Anyway Civ4 is now running ok. So a suggestion to other players having startup problems is go to the microsoft update site and download the latest patches.

Calum

 

[dubious]

It took me a while to realize that after installing patch 1.52, I needed to either disable my firewall or tell it to let the new version access the internet. Until this was done, Civ would not start. The cursor "hourglass" would appear and then quit with nothing else to show the game had even attempted to start. This was even before log files were created, which made it frustrating to track down. Apparently this internet access check occurs very early in the startup. Remember when debugging startup problems to be sure to close everything else even if it worked correctly previously.

-Dubious=