"Program is not a valid win32 application"

[DasSmoof]

Wow, I can't say how much this problem is pissing me off. I installed C&C the first decade last night and all was fine. I played classic C&C, Red Alert, Tiberiun Sun, RA2. All worked great. Now this morning, C&C and RA give me this BS that they're not valid win32 applications. The other two work totally fine. This probably can be fixed if I reinstall, but it will just come back and I will have to continue reinstalling.

Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this annoyance? Compatibility mode is set to Win95 and all is good. Nothing has changed since last night. In fact, my PC has still been on since last night.

 

[DasSmoof]

bump

 

[DaveSimmons]

dying hard drive - file corruption? bad memory stick leading to the file corruption? unstable overclock?

you could reinstall, use an MD5 generator to get checksums for the files, then next time the error appears run the MD5 program again and see if the checksum has changed.

 

[beggerking]

did windows xp automatically install any update lastnight?

 

[shortylickens]

Dave Simmons had a good suggestion.

It looks like the executables are corrupted. I'd recommend you look at the CD's and see if you can copy them over directly. Since you have a bunch of games, just look in the install directory for anything ending in .exe.

I should think any file on the CD would be perfect, especially since you said they ran once before.

 

[reverend boltron]

Yeah, also, are you using any programs that patch the exe files? Because that can definitely mess things up. Especially 3rd party patches that you get from Russian websites.