Look here regarding problems getting VanillaMod to work or to verify installation

[Fierro]

I can't get this to work.

Here is what I am doing.

1. Create VanillaMod folder. inside F:\Medieval II Total War\
2. Unzip the VanillaMod download into VanillaMod.
3. Unzip the fix into VanillaMod overwriting files.
4. Put a copy of medieval2.preferences.cfg on the desktop
5. Rename this copy of medieval2.preferences.cfg to VanillaMod (have tried both renaming it to VanillaMod and VanillaMod.cfg)
6. Open the new VanillaMod.cfg on the desktop into notepad and add
[features]
mod=VanillaMod
7. Save the file and put it back into F:\Medieval II Total War\
8. In F:\Medieval II Total War\VanillaMod run VanillaMod.bat

What happens is I get an DOS prompt window that comes up but goes away immediately followed by absolutely nothing.

Yesterday I tried putting VanillaMod.bat inside F:\Medieval II Total War\
I ran the file and the DOS prompt came up but stayed for a few seconds and the game eventually launched but absolutely nothing was changed.

Any ideas? As far as I can tell I'm following the directions. If it makes any difference I'm running the Gold Edition, I know on RTW there were some issues with people who used the gold edition when trying to run certain mods... I am also running XP so there is no issue of permissions or things like that.