Freezes on loading screen

[DemiMIRV]

I bought Civ4 today but am unable to run it. It installed fine, but when I try to start the game (by either double clicking the shortcut icon or pressing play from the autorun) it will go to the "Loading" screen that has the text "Loading" in 6 different languages. It will not go any further than that, and sometimes will freeze up the computer. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling and made sure the DirectX from the cd was installed. Does anyone have any suggestions?

My System Specs:
AMD Athlon 3200+ 2.21GHz
2 Gig RAM
GeForce 6800GT 256MB

 

[DemiMIRV]

UPDATE:

Still cannot get in. I was able to install it on my friend's computer, which has less RAM but the same video card and it worked fine. Mine just won't get past that loading screen. I checked out the folder I installed it into, and for some reason it created a lot of shortcuts to drive P, which is a shared drive on our network. It seems it installed some of the program there. I transfered those files to my folder, but I still was not able to run. I am getting no error messages. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Gog]

I'm having the exact problem. The screen starts to load but then nothing happens. Shortcuts appear in the installed folders...and when I double click a shortcut file it doesn't find the target. ("%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Replays") - This target doesn't exist on my computer. I have a stand alone..specs are:
HP Pavilion 750n
Intel P-IV 1.6 GHZ
512 MB RAM
35.5 GB free space (after install)
NVIDIA GeForce MX 4000

I also installed the latest SDK October files for Direct X 9. I originally had an error message: (this application has failed to start because D3DX9_26.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.) The update fixed this problem.

 

[Gog]

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...88-a893-4f0b-a932-5e024e74519f&DisplayLang=en

I downloaded and isntalled the .exe file.

If anyone that matters reads these...just a note - the game uses CD1 to play not CD2.