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ah, you absolutely need to be an admin in order for everything to work correctly.
 
viper37 -

I have uninstalled and reinstalled, changed the color settings to every setting available on my computer, etc. Still doesn't work. I always get that same error message and then get dumped back to my desktop.

I am running XP (but I am the admin and only user on this computer, so that should not be the problem), and EU2 version 1.05 (North America-SF).

Any other ideas?
 
Use this:
http://www.directxbuster.de/index_e.html
it will remove DirectX from your system, and then you reinstall DX8.0a. If it works, upgrade to DX 8.1. Then if it works, naturally, you keep it ;) otherwise, you repeat the same steps and stick with 8.0a.