Copy protection problems

[mscha]

Hi there!

I have a (legal) copy of Civ3, but for some reason if refuses to play, both on my desktop and my laptop. (Both Windows 2000.)
The desktop has a DVD and a CDRW, the laptop has a DVD/CDRW combo. On my desktop, I have reinstalled it using both drives.

It behaves as follows: When I click on the icon, the splash screen shows. Then the movie shows *sometimes*. (At other times, it goes back to the desktop.)
After the movie, I get the start screen, when I click on "play", it goes back to the desktop. Consistently.

I'm pretty sure this is a copy protection problem. (In fact, it worked fine with an executable from gamecopyworld.com, but now I want to play the patched version. )

The behaviour after the patch (the refreshed one) is the same.

I wonder why this happens with *both* my PC's. It seems too much of a coincidence - I'm sure there are plenty of systems running Windows 2000 that don't have this problem.

One theory: both of my PC's are running Easy CD Creator 5.0. Could that have something to do with it?
Anyone else here running Easy CD Creator? Do you have problems running Civ?

Thanks in advance,

- Michael

[Osiris III]

try upgrade to platinium

[0:) Innocence]

When having these kinds of problems always start out by disabling all running applications before trying to run the game again, including programs such as DirectCD which run in the background and AntiVirus applications. This is the only way to find out whether you're having a software conflict or if your CD is damaged somehow.

[mscha]

Found the culprit!

Well, I found what was causing the problem on my machines.

I killed every process in sight, even the really unlikely ones, until Civ got past the copy protection.
The culprit was a fancy mouse cursor program that I'm using called "CursorEx Plus". If this is loaded, Civ doesn't get past the copy protection, it it isn't loaded, it does.
Weird ... must be some timing thing.

CursorEx has actually been taken under new management and is now called CursorXP (http://www.cursorxp.com). I have upgraded to the new version, and now I can get past the copy protection with it loaded, unless I am moving the mouse around in circles while loading.

Hope this helps someone else,

- Michael