Steam game problem help?

[{GrailK}Seth]

hey guys first off id like to say nice website!

ive recently purchased and downloaded Medieval 2 total war using steam. the first time i ran it, it worked just fine the entire time i played, but after i logged off slept and came back the next day it didnt work. it doesnt give me a reason why it stopped working other than " a problem has been encountered and the program will now shut down". something to that effect. now i did once own the cd and played it just fine the entire time i had it, but after loosing the cd's i deleted it. a friend of mine told me to be sure i got rid of all residual files that might have been left over from me deleting it, but i went one step more and restored my computer to its factory condition, not just to fix this problem but others as well. such as my nvidia control pannel for windows vista home premium. i have plenty of ram and all that jazz i have played this game with the cd almost since it came out and never encountered a problem like this. ive tried to confirm the game cache and it says everything is ok and it still doenst work.
upon further review though i ventured into the system log for med2 and i found this
00:35:42.027 [system.io] [warning] open: preferences/player.txt is missing
00:35:42.027 [system.io] [warning] open: preferences/keys.dat is missing
i dont know what this means really or do i have the smallest idea of how to correct it. this site is basically the last place i know of that might be able to help. steam support didnt do me any good. there were people there with some of the same problems, but nobody every answered their posts. sorry about the long post. please post anything that might work that i havnt already tried it would be very helpfull.
ill be happy to try and answere any questions some one may have in hopes of solving this problem.

thanx guys hope to talk to you soon.

[irishron]

Those two entries in the system log seem to always be empty. I think it's part og CA not cleaning up the game before release.

From all the posts in Empire's tech forum about Steam related crashes is reinstall the game. Something got messed up. I would even turn off the UAC.

[{GrailK}Seth]

i dont know what the UAC is lol

[irishron]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/m...19.aspx?ppud=4 will tell you how to disable it.

If you want the full tale of this security layer called User Access Control, Google it.