Vista - VERY WEIRD DirectDraw problem

This seems to be a very strange phenomena. When I start up Age of Empires 2 I get the directdraw problem that many people have had before - yet when I put my lenovo T61p in its dock I can run the game fine. I found out that the key is whether it is hooked up to my external monitor. I can literally have the laptop in the dock connected to an external monitor that is off (thus I am using only the laptop monitor) and the game will work. As soon as I unplug the external monitor that I wasn't even using, the game will give me the directdraw error. I even started up the game and then unplugged the external monitor and the game music kept going but the screen went blank; plugged it back in and it returned. I have tried all of the directdraw solutions online (compatibility mode stuff, nostartup etc.)

I have a lenovo thinkpad t61p with a dedicated graphics card, a NVIDIA Quatro 570M