Atilius: Thanks for that, didn't know that was how you could disable the intro. Unfortunately it had no effect on my little problem.
Oaty/Cras: I've been keeping an eye on process explorer (I was recommended by a work colleague to use that instead of task manager) and it appears that Rome has shut down successfully. However there's possibly some other stuff which may be significant. Under the entry for RomeTW.exe there's a child process getting opened called '~e5.0001'. This is from the "C:\Documents and Settings\Paul Bambury\Local Settings\Temp\" directory. In process explorer it has a description of 'Cleanup' and the associated company name is 'Macrovision'. ~e5.0001 itself is a file that appears to be getting created when I start windows. I've deleted it and when I reboot its back again. Opening this file in Notepad reveals mostly uninterpretable ASCII. However there are some lines of potential interest which I've cut and pasted below:
__GLOBAL_HEAP_SELECTED __MSVCRT_HEAP_SELECT ÿÿÿÿ þb@ ÿÿÿÿ ‡c@ runtime error
TLOSS error
SING error
DOMAIN error
R6028
- unable to initialize heap
R6027
- not enough space for lowio initialization
R6026
- not enough space for stdio initialization
R6025
- pure virtual function call
R6024
- not enough space for _onexit/atexit table
R6019
- unable to open console device
R6018
- unexpected heap error
R6017
- unexpected multithread lock error
R6016
- not enough space for thread data
abnormal program termination
R6009
- not enough space for environment
R6008
- not enough space for arguments
R6002
- floating point not loaded
Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library
Runtime Error!
Program: ... <program name unknown>
BTW I have a 1Gb of RAM and according to process explorer just 313Mb of that is being used by Windows. Launching Rome to the main menu increases that 454Mb and when exiting it drops back to 327Mb.
There's also a directory containing some temporary files which has a very similar name, '~e5.0001.dir.0000'. This directory appears to be getting created by RomeTW.exe. Upon exiting RTW, both of these processes disappear, the directory '~e5.0001.dir.0000' is deleted. When I attempt a relaunch the process RomeTW.exe is created and also creates the child process ~e5.0001 again, with the directory. And the crash then deletes it.
I've googled for ~e5.0001 and there's a whole raft of issues that this little chap appears (or is getting the blame for) to be causing. But little in the way of concrete proof. I don't suppose either of you could have a look and see if a similar process is being run on your machines when you start Rome. Thanks.