7 Wonders II crashes on Win XP

Hello,

since nobody replyed to my general rant I will post specific bug-descriptions for the non-working games.

7 Wonders II starts (the intro-screen is shown where the cursor changes and some things are initialized). And then it turns to a black screen after which the mouse pointer quickly alternates between the regular and the sandclock-image, there is distorted sound to be heard (it seems to be alternating between two sounds) and then the game just quits/crashes after a while. This is on Win XP.