Hi Frontline and Welcome to Vistax64.com!
We also help out 32bit users, I myself use 32bit.
As for AOE3 Have you downloaded the latest game patch?
Download Here:
Ensemble Studios: Age of Empires III: Game Updates
Im thinking the problem is defiantly related to your on-board Graphics card or Intel(R) G33/G31 Express Chipset...
Built-in graphics cards use your CPU and memory to enable them to function and while this is good for movies or general use its absolutly horrible for all games.
Most games are resource hogs especially when it comes to graphics so when you have a built-in graphics card using your CPU and Memory it becomes a dogs breakfast for the game trying to render images...
Take these examples:
OnBoard: Game loads graphics into memory then sends to CPU for processing then back to the memory then the CPU again before getting displayed onscren, this overlapping causes the little amount of resources the on-board card has to overload and crash the game.
Seperate: Yet if you have a separate graphics card in the system the game can send the graphics directly to the separate graphics card getting instantly displayed without having to run back and forth saving all the other resources for other uses also giving Vista a huge performace increase.
So if the patch doesnt get the game working go out and buy a graphics card for your computer, They are fairly cheap these days.
I hope this helps, Let me know if you need some more help finding a good graphics card.
cheers
Steven