OK, I finally got my VI to play on this computer. I went through months of trying this or that and throwing up my hands, putting it away, and then a couple of months later pulling it back out and trying it again. First I'll tell you what I tried that didn't work, then I'll tell you what I did to get it working perfectly.
I have a Dell 8200 Pentium 4 with a PNY Nvidia FX 5500 graphics card. Every time I would try to play a campaign, withing a few turns it would crash to desktop. I tried every refresh rate, every resolution setting, every Anti-Aliasing setting and every other setting and combination of settings without success.
One suggestion did improve it, that was creating an individual profile where my AA was set to 4X. With this setting it still crashed every few turns, but I could save often and still make progress. Before, the crashes seemed tied to some corrupted country or army and as soon as I clicked on it...crash.

Finally I went to Nvidia's web sight. I started the procedure to download the latest driver (which I already had) and then on the left side of the screen is an active button for driver archives. I went into their archives and tried several of the older drivers. I ended up using an FX 5200 driver from 2004 and voila!!!!! the game works perfectly.

I have read where some could get it to work with resolution settings, and some with AA settings but the only thing that worked for me was old drivers.
I hope this helps someone else, I spent many hours trying different things over the last couple of years, until finally I got my favorite game of all time up and running!