Civ 4 not starting on Vista?

[cochy115]

Hi, everyone. I successfully installed Civ 4, Warlords and Beyond the Sword when I got this computer up and running. However, I had to uninstall it because it was installed in some weird hidden file I could not access. This is where the problems began. I started getting Cyclic Redudancy Errors on CD 2 of BTS. After much frustration, I got the game exchanged at Best Buy. I tried it. This time I got the CRC error on the original Civ 4 CDs. At that point, I figured it's the DVD ROM so I installed it on my second one. Installation went smoothly... but now when I click "play," nothing happens. The shortcuts don't work. Not for Civ 4, Warlords or BTS... any ideas?

I will now do this the formal way:

-Game does not load when I click start on autorun or double click the shortcuts (also when I go into my Program Files and double click on the original application).

-No error messages. Nothing happens. I expect the program to run as normal when I click play.

-Latest patch is installed.

My computer:

e-GE-Force 8800 GT, P5N-e SLI motherboard, Windows Vista 32 Bit...

[Sabre2th]

Sounds to me like the previous installation left files and registry entries that are causing your problem. If you're fairly computer savvy and are comfortable doing so, uninstall civ4 and delete any Civ4 registry entries you can find. You should probably also delete the Civ folder in My Games, though I doubt it would cause this particular problem.

If you're not sure you're comfortable doing this, wait and hopefully someone else can give you something better.

Good luck

[snoopy369]

It sounds like you have some problems on your computer that you should resolve before trying to fix this. You shouldn't have this many issues, and whenever I see a computer that has this many issues I presume that *any* issues it has are related to the computer and not the program.

One solution certainly is to do a thorough uninstall and wipe ... it's very possible something isn't being uninstalled completely. I'd also be concerned about admin permissions; are you logged in as an administrator on the machine, or running the install (and the program) as an administrator? Finally, do you have any software that controls program running (many antivirus programs do this now), perhaps that is blocking Civ4 from running (with PC-Cillin on default, for example, it pops up a box asking me if I want to run any given program when I do so for the first time, and refuses to allow it to work). Vista I believe does this on its own as well.

[Standup]

Couple of obvious suggestions but not so obvious that they've not caught me out.

I've had error messages similar to yours and it was actually finger print smudges on the disc.

As to Vista are you logged on as administrator? Have you ticked the XP compatible box? And the way I run it is to pin it to the start menu - didn't seem to like other ways.

Edit: oops just reread Snoopy's post and seen he's already suggested admin problems.

[Hydro]

I had a very similar problem when BtS failed to install. When I tried the BtS link the game just told me there was an error and dumped me at my desktop. Then I tried re-installing and BtS tried to play, I got an error message, and it dumped me to my desktop again. I tried un-installing and re-installing (three times) with various permutations (uninstall and re-install – failed; uninstall, turn off PC, reinstall - fail; uninstall, delete entire Civ directory, turn off PC, reinstall-fail). Absolutely nothing worked and no matter what I did the PC seemed to think that BtS was installed – even when Civ4 was uninstalled and the entire Civ directory had been deleted.

I was about to return BtS out of frustration and disgust when I found a tech note at the Civ site that said that in cases of an install problem like mine that I needed to manually go to the CD and manually activate the install file. Don’t rely on the auto-install. That worked!

Good luck!
Hydro

[cochy115]

Originally posted by Sabre2th
Sounds to me like the previous installation left files and registry entries that are causing your problem. If you're fairly computer savvy and are comfortable doing so, uninstall civ4 and delete any Civ4 registry entries you can find. You should probably also delete the Civ folder in My Games, though I doubt it would cause this particular problem.

If you're not sure you're comfortable doing this, wait and hopefully someone else can give you something better.

Good luck

That was exactly the problem... well, kind of. The registry was clean, but there were a bunch of files from my initial installation in a hidden folder. I deleted it and it worked. Thanks for everyone's help.