It doesn't do anything. I can get it to appear it is going to work by clicking launcher.exe (not sure on the extension there) from the CD, but then nothing happens when I click play MTW besides the launcher closing. It doesn't even show up in task manager.

I have turned off UAC via the little flag in the taskbar and gave myself as many permissions to the drive it is installed to as I could. I have administrator privileges and have tried starting it under XP service pack 2 and 3 and with "run as admin". I also downloaded and installed the latest directx drivers. It doesn't seem like all that should be necessary.