Vista Screen Problem

[Narnia]

Once in a while when playing BtS, my screen will go black (I have a laptop running vista home premium). It will be completely black except for the mouse which still appears and works and is still the BtS mouse, not the normal windows mouse. The screen will then turn back on. Sometimes this is it. However, a few times after the screen has recovered, a few seconds later it will go black again. This problem will repeat itself endlessly. This is the third time that the screen has started the off/on/off/on cycle. Any time it does that an icon will show up on the section of the taskbar that has the clock, sound volume, battery, Norton icon, etc. The icon has no name and is a yellow triangle pointing up with a black ! in the middle of it. This is the third time this problem has started arising. The first time I had to uninstall the game and reinstall it. The second time I was able to fix the problem but I forgot how I did it. What is going on and why? How can I fix it?
PS: I think it only starts blinking if I get a reminder from Outlook while playing the game but I often get reminders from outlook when playing the game and it almost never causes a problem. Is it just a corinsidance or are the two programs interacting?
Thank you.

 

[ori]

what operating system is this?
please post your dxdiag results file.
is the game patched to date?

 

[Furiey]

Added to ori's questions:
What anit-virus/firewall are you using?

 

[Narnia]

I got civ4 Complete so it came with all patches. What is dxdiag? In responce to Furiey, Norton 360.

 

[Furiey]

I think Complete still needs the 3.19 patch. What does it say in advanced > about this build?
Is this a disc version or a downloaded version? I think that some downloaded versions may be fully patched but not all.

I asked about the firewall as there have recently been reports with Comodo and black screen but as you have Norton it won't be that.

To get to dxdiag in Vista:

Press the start button.
In the search box type dxdiag.
It will list the file dxdiag.exe - click on it to run.
Click on the button "Save all Information" to save you dxdiag information as a text file.
Post attach the file to a post here.

 

[Narnia]

I feel kind of dumb right now... when I restarted my computer the problem disapeared . Thanks for the help anyways.