Can't for the life of me get AoE II Conquerors to work with Win 7

I'm not sure where this thread goes, my laptop manufacturer forum, OS forum or here, but please move where appropriate.

I'm under deep suspicion that this game simply does not work with Windows 7 Ultimate. Why Ultimate? I don't know but it works fine with my friend's Win 7 home premium rig.

Or it's something to do with my graphics cards - the 280m's in SLI. If someone with these cards could confirm theirs work fine it would help me rule out yet another thing.


So, I've tried everything... EVERYTHING I can think of but that same darn error message comes up when I run the disk. It just crashes out and says 'Age of Empires Expansion has stopped working'. Yet, very very occassionally it will work but this is useless when you want to play with friends through Game Ranger.


I have tried the following:

Reinstalling from scratch - no registry entries left, complete reinstall.
Running under Admin mode
Checking resolution options/color modes in properties
Running under every compatibility mode - Win 95 to Vista SP2
Patching both games with the latest patches
Adding an exception for the firewall
Turning off the firewall
Reformatting my laptop (not for the game, I was doing that anyway...)


I keep coming back to this issue after months and months when my friends and I want to play it and I refuse to give up on it.


If anyone has suggestions on a fix/workaround it would be greatly appreciated.

I'd even settle for an explanation as to why it doesn't work. Surely, other people with my OS/GFX cards would have come across this before or is this game just not that popular any more...

 

did you turn off sli in the nvidia control panel? that might be causing the issue for you as I can run it fine on win 7 pro x64

 

Sent a PM that might help.

 

Thanks myDooM, checked my inbox.

Nah, tried it with SLI off too

Still the same old issue, maybe it's the Nvidia drivers it doesn't like?


Here's what I grabbed from Event viewer:

Faulting application name: AGE2_X1.ICD, version: 0.7.26.809, time stamp: 0x3b7433ec
Faulting module name: AGE2_X1.ICD, version: 0.7.26.809, time stamp: 0x3b7433ec
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x001ebc7b
Faulting process id: 0x17e8
Faulting application start time: 0x01cb507d2282b2e0
Faulting application path: C:\PROGRA~2\MICROS~4\AGEOFE~1\Age2_x1\AGE2_X1.ICD
Faulting module path: C:\PROGRA~2\MICROS~4\AGEOFE~1\Age2_x1\AGE2_X1.ICD
Report Id: 62e9b270-bc70-11df-84b7-0026b96fdbbe