Windows critical update seems to have disabled kingdoms.exe

[Geoffrey of Villehardouin]

I have had this problem several times and gone back to an earlier restore point. This time it seems a Windows critical update that had been downloaded before my earliest restore point was activated on a reboot and has disabled kingdoms.exe. I cannot get it back to work and of course no kingdoms mod will run on my laptop.

Among my options may be to find the file that was installed by the critical update and remove it, if anyone knows where that might be and what might it be called or where to find info on it, if it can be done at all.

Another option is to buy a new computer with a Linux operating system and reinstall everything.

Other suggestions are welcome. At this point I cannot be annoyed more.

EDIT: Another possibility is that the problem has nothing to do with the critical update, and was caused by new bad sectors on the hard drive or some other type of corruption. I discovered that two mods I haven't played in years still run the kingdoms.exe. So it could be that there is a bad sector in some cache e.g. in the virtual store or something like that. Does this seem possible? A bad sector on a cached version of the kingdoms.exe would not explain why a couple of mod-related executives had their icons also deleted from my desktop, unless some major corruption happened that incidentally affected a bunch of total war exe files. Any ideas or thoughts on what to check to get the kingdoms.exe to work?