freeze ups at beginning of game

[sethos]

When I first installed the game (and then the patch) in late December the game would freeze on the initial start up screen with the picture of the castle. It would also cause problems for launching other games after attempting to open it. Communication from Infogrames led me to disable Adaptec DirectCD, which got me to the first screen of the game, where you choose map size, etc. Then it would crash with a message like civ3 caused an error in civ3.exe. This error seemed to relate to division by zero. I then updated the driver for my video card and now am back to freezing on the castle screen. The program won't even launch in Safe Mode or with all nonessential programs turned off. I'd really like to play this game (I've played Civ1 and Civ2), but I'm starting to think I've bought an expensive coaster. My system is:
Compaq Presario 7000
800 mhz Athalon Processor
Compaq DVD ROM drive (IDE)
20 GB HD (IDE)
30 GB HD (IDE)
ZIP 250 (IDE)
2 50x CD ROMs (IDE)
512 MB memory
Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 64 MB graphics card (AGP)
SoundBlaster Live! X-Gamer audio card (PCI)
IDE PCI card
SCSI PCI card
external SCSI tower with:
Jaz 1GB
3 Matsu****a CD drives (Apple)
Yamaha CDR-W drive
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
Sethos the Destroyer

[SSushi]

It's annoying! I've been on the phone to the help desk and they couldn't help much.

Try deleting the movies, this should get the game to start.