Napoleon & Empire both CTD on startup (DXDiag inside)

Hey all-

On my new desktop, both Napoleon and Empire crash immediately upon launch - sometimes they get as far as the first splash screen with the copyright info, sometimes they don't.

This is a 32-bit Windows 7 box with 12 GB of RAM.

Any advice for me? DX Diag is attached. Thanks in advance.

1. Have you installed directx 9.0c, C++ 2005 SP1, and .net 4 manually?
2. Uninstall the realTek sound drivers in Device Manager. If it works, reinstall the newest ones you can find .
3. Another player with 12gb tokk out half of it and the game worked.

All right, some progress here, thanks to irishron:

I found some new realTek sound drivers (really new - Jan 2011) and installed them. I also installed .net 4 and the C++ 2005 SP1.

Now Napoleon works, but Empire does not. Any further hypotheses? I'm not going to take out half my RAM but I might try rolling back to Direct X 9.0C, unless anyone else has any ideas.

No need to roll back directx.

Just install it. Directx 11 won't even know it's there. In fact you have CA's out of date version or Napoleon would not work.

Maybe time in Empire to delete the scripts folder and verify your game cache.

I'll be damned but that worked.

Thanks irishron!

You're welcome.