I've had both Rome & MEII Total War for some time. Recently, both games have begun to crash every time it loads for a battle. MEII gives an "unspecified error" & Rome just crashes with no error. I have removed & reinstalled both games clean, with no mods. I haven't done anything to my system recently that should cause this problem. I've tried messing with the in-game video options, to no avail. My system is more than adequate for both games, and was running battles fine a week ago.

Anyone have an ideas?

Hi, I had the same problem. Playing Rome, my monitor would all of a sudden go blank for a few seconds the I would end up on the desktop, and later as it became worse, my computer would actually restart ingame. After I had built a new PC (it was time for an upgrade anyway) a friend of mine told me that it was either the hard drive's time to die or that Window's XP had become corrupted, but he wasn't able to tell me for sure until I brought him the hard drive.

Anyway, my point is you should make a backup of everything that's important to you on that hard drive as soon as possible, ASAP. Now.

I thought that it wouldn't get much worse but now windows is so corrupted that when I turn it on 9 times out of 10 windows doesn't even boot up, and the one time it did, it lasted about three minutes.

In closing, I might be wrong, but from what you've said, it sounds exactly the same as my my episode. Just to be safe, I would make a backup of everything thats important to me.