Rome Total War: Gold -Random menu only freezes-

Most of the time when i play RTW:Gold edition the game crashes only in the menu. I cannot do anything to exit other than holding the power button down until the computer shuts off. I cant Ctrl+Alt+Delete, Alt+F4, Alt+Tab, etc to escape. I'm thinking it may have to do with the games Directx 10 compatibility which vista forces me to use, but its most likely something else

Specs:
2.4 GB DDR2 Ram
nvidia 128 mb 6150SE nForce 430 (sucks right)
320 GB HDD
3802 mb page file
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ (2.01 Ghz x2)
Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit

I also tried on my friends laptop and it easily navigated the menu without error.

Those specs were worse than mine for the most part

2 GB DDR2 Ram
nvidia 32 mb 6150SE nforce 430
180 GB HDD
2302 mb Page file
AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core Processor QL-62 (2 Ghz x2)
Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit

Thanks in advance.

What kind of a sound card/chip do you have and your friend has?

Except for you having a little better graphics chip, your machines are virtually identical so it's someplace in your setup versus his.

As for diectx10, isatall http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en and see if it helps.

I have a ALC 888 chipset HD 6-channel audio as for the other computer I never looked at the sound card but its probably 6-channel like mine. As for DirectX I have the latest version of DirectX10 but I think it may be overpowering the version expected by RTW:Gold and causing conflicting problems in the graphics card. And I cannot downgrade the DirectX version on a vista.

Install it anyway. The two will never see each other. We do it all the time on Medieval2. I've done ever since Vista was released.

I did install and I will test it by going into every menu option and if it does not crash I'll leave it in the menu for a couple extra minutes and come back.

I tried playing after I installed and I got through the menus for a while (that sometimes happens on lucky occasions) and then crashed. Then I tried two more times and each crashed within 10 seconds.