This time it wasn't my antivirus-it was a combination of Vista not wanting to let stuff edit my program files as it patched. I did a verify-ing of the game files and then tried again and SUCCESS!

I only had time to play a turn or two but on the whole I am happy with this game and it seems that the AI is more or less fixed- after the first turn there was only one DOW between other nations (russia vs sweden).

Nations seem to want to play nice when I tried to make some trade agreements, it seems that whether or not a nation likes you has an effect now.