Go into custom battle, hit escape and go into the video options. Make sure unit shaders is checked, and unit detail is at least on medium. That should get rid of the pointy feet unless you're video card is quite old.

I think what you have to do to make sure you have a good install is uninstall RTW, install RTW v1.0, apply the RTW v1.2 patch and then install whatever mod you want such as RTR 5.4. What I do is keep an RTW v1.2 install without any modifications, and copy that folder tree to a new folder everytime I want to try a mod. That way I don't have to reinstall the game if I want to change mods. It does take considerable disk space to keep multiple copies of RTW on the hard drive.