Vista - AOEII stopped working...rather won't start

On my Vista laptop, I installed AOEII a week ago, couldn't get it to LAN with my other two comp's through a new N router, gave up and it worked fine through my old G. Then, I tried to start the game and it crashes every time. I had it on a clone drive so it would run off the harddrive. Thought that was the problem so I uninstalled and reinstalled off the disc. Still crashes. Ran Spybot & Ad-Aware, uninstalled and ran AusLogics reg defrag, CCleaner and reinstalled. Still won't work. I had it running in compatibility mode, installed the latest "super" DirectX file I saw listed in another thread...I don't get it. Why won't it even start now? Here is one of the event details:

Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: empires2.exe
Application Version: 0.14.22.712
Application Timestamp: 39100af3
Fault Module Name: empires2.exe
Fault Module Version: 0.14.22.712
Fault Module Timestamp: 39100af3
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0000d77a
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 79c5
Additional Information 2: 3c6141a99c64913e839a5797585b8501
Additional Information 3: d6c6
Additional Information 4: 81a837f429284dd97a442de159940a5a

Thank you for any help!!!
Ken

Should i be worried now, since i installed AOE2 on my laptop?!

um, no idea, but thats interesting......
At the moment, im trying to get HOMAM3 to work... its driving me up the wall!

Don't know if you should be worried... it was weird, worked for over a week, was trying to get it to work through a new router (gave up on that one) and now every time I try to start it I get a pop up that says it has stopped working...

I ended up installing Virtual PC and running it through XPpro... but I don't get why it just up and stopped.