I finally got it to work! It turns out that I had been installing it correctly, and everything was clean, etc. The problem was that there was a lot of leftover wierd stuff in C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Activision\Rome - Totalwar. I deleted it all and now EB 1.0 works fine.

I hope this doesn't happen to anyone else... it was quite possibly the most frustrating thing I have had to deal with in a long time.