How about NO STARTUP AT ALL?

[seebs]

Not a crash. Not a hang. Not an error. Just... Nothing. No dialog boxes. No sound effects. No errors. No warnings.

The game has never created a .ini file, so there isn't an ini file to edit, so I can't enable logging (and I doubt that creating an invalid INI file would help!)

At one point I got the "insert the right disk" message a few times. Gave up and reinstalled, but now NOTHING AT ALL HAPPENS. Not even an error message.

I have to admit, the copy protection is working beautifully. I can't even run the game from an original disk, I can hardly imagine how anyone could run it from a copy.

Any suggestions? I'm afraid I'm a bit of a Unix guy, not a Windows guy, so my first instinct was "just log all the system calls to see what it's doing", but I guess we can't do that.

[seebs]

Found it!

Firewall was blocking something Civ4 spawned.

No error message, of course.

Anyway, with that gone, it seems to be working fine. Well, "fine" meaning it made a bunch of choppy sounds, reset my display resolution three times, and then suddenly came to a beautiful and stable intro screen.

*sigh*

Now to wait for the ever so friendly alcohol people to eliminate the horrible whirring noise this game keeps making.

[Socko972001]

I appear to be having this same problem seebs. I don't suppose you'd be so kind as to post info about how to fix this could you?

[seebs]

In my case, the problem was that my firewall wasn't letting Civ4 run other programs. The Civ4 executable just launches a program called "Cleanup" which is the copy protection wrapper.

If you have a firewall that controls whether or not applications can launch other applications, have it allow Civ4 to start other programs.