Help with Running Rome: Total War and EB

I have been struggling with this all night and I was hoping that someone might be able to give me some guidance. A while ago, I installed EB and was pretty successful playing it. However, tonight, I was no longer able to play EB. Everytime I try to open it, I get the message, "Access denied, please login with administrator privileges and try again." When I try to run the game in Admin mode, it does not load. The same thing is happening to the original Rome: Total War. I have tried re-installing both Rome and EB, in different locations, but I am still unable to play. I either keep getting the Access Denied message, or the game does not load if run in Admin mode. At this point, I do not know what else to do, as I have tried everything I could find, including:

*Enabling Admin mode (game does not run)
*Setting compatibility with Windows XP (game does not run)
*Installing the game in C:\Users\xxx (still getting admin error)
*Disabling UAC (still getting admin error)

I am running Windows 8.1 (yeah, I know); however, my second PC has Windows 7, and I keep getting the same set of errors.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I can possibly do to fix this? It would be very unfortunate if I can no longer play this game. :(

Thank you in advance for your help!

EDIT: I found it weird that every time I reinstalled Rome, it did not prompt me for a CD Key.

I was having the same problem. Turns out the culprit is a windows update. This is affecting other games as well. At a simcity forum I found a solution.

hxxp://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/68930-windows-update-kb3086255-blocks-sc4-from-starting/
(replace xx with tt)
Hope this help, it did for me.

Ps: remember to hide the update (scenario 2) after you have uninstalled the update or it might be reinstalled when you close the computer.

Perfect, thank you. That definitely did the trick. I very much appreciate the help!

Thanks for letting us know!

:bow: