Unable to Start the Game Any Longer

So I've been playing EB on the same PC for several versions now and have never had any technical problems with it. The install I am using currently is the same one I've been using since the most current version of EB was released.

I've been playing quite heavily the past few weeks (Hayasdan campaign), usually for 10-12 hours per day, with breaks every few hours to clear up the alleged memory leak. Played until about 5am this morning, slept a bit, got back up at noon and...boom. No EB.

I run the .exe as always and the game gets as far as the EB intro screen (right before the video portion of the startup would engage) and then crashes to desktop. Except I get no error message, RTW is still active on my task bar, and my task manager claims that it is running fine with no problems. But every time I click on it on the taskbar, the screen just flashes black and I am looking at my desktop again.

Any ideas on why this is happening or how to fix? I looked through the FAQ and fix lists and stuff and I know there is a plethora of stuff about failed startups, but I'm not sure most of them apply to an install that's been running fine for years and then crashes with no error message.

My RTW discs are packed away from my last move, so I'd prefer to not have to dig them out and reinstall from scratch. But I guess that'll be my next step if I can't get this fixed.

I'm running Vista 32 (SP2) and 4GB of RAM. I'd list the rest of my specs, but I really don't think the problem is hardware related, since the game has run beautifully on this machine for years now.