No that is only a side effect of what it does,Sultan Of Swing said:Well, I'm no expert, but after reading this advice so many times:
in the Hearts of Iron main folder(e.g c:\heartsofiron) change the folder named 'avi' to 'avi_back'
Supposedly this works for most problems, including my own crash to desktop when trying to start the game, and as far as I know all it does is disable the starting movie.