I just had this happen on one of my machines as well, my work desktop to be specific. It started fine the first time, I went into options, set them all appropriately to this machine. Went back to main menu, got the message stating "some changes you've made require a restart of the game", did that and hasn't run since.
It does get to the graphic for loading screen, but never to the menu page.
Tried a couple things:
Verify
Uninstall/Reinstall. Tried this twice I believe, once with a restart of windows between uninstall and reinstall, once with a complete power down of computer between.
No luck.
Some of the settings I remember changing:
Turned music all the way down.
Set anti-aliasing to off.
Set game to skip intro.
Turned off some other more graphics intensive options (forget which they were, shadows and something else I believe)
Set auto-save to 4 turns.
Turned grid on (I think)
My guess is possibly something got left in the registry that is mucking up the works? Does the uninstall do a good job of clearing that out?
