FileForums - Civilization 4 problem (an unusual one)

Hi there

I downloaded and installed Civ4, mounted it and ran sd4hide. So far, so good. It entered the game, and then I clicked the "Civilopedia" (or whatever it's called) option, which popped me back to desktop.

After that, every time I try to enter the game, it goes through the loading process (init XML, init Python and so on) and at the end just exits. Nothing happens, it just exits.

What's confusing is that it worked once. I saw it working. Now, repeating the exact same steps fails to launch the game. I've tried restarting, reinstalling, switching from Alcohol 120% to Daemon Tools back and forth, changing drive letters, using antiblaxx...but nothing seems to work. I also tried the VirtualCDHide/Win2000 trick, but it's the same problem.

Can anyone help? It's frustrating, because I know it *can* work, but for some reason it doesn't.