Are you talking about the new minimal user interface during battles that came with the patch? If so, I believe that can be disabled by going into the Rome Total War folder and opening the text file preferences.txt . Inside, you'll find a bunch of items that can be changed, and the one that you want to change is 'minimal_ui' (I think, I'm not entirely sure, but it is something like that.) The thing you want to change is 'minimal_ui: TRUE' to 'minimal_ui: FALSE'.

If the thing you want is for the game to open like a windows folder, so it doesn't take up the entire screen, I don't know exactly how to do that, but it might be in the same preferences folder I mentioned above, under something like 'full_screen' which you would, again, change from TRUE to FALSE. Or, it might be an option in the in-game options menu. Unfortunately, I'm not at all sure about this.

Good luck, and God bless.

Crazed Rabbit