latest safedisc games crashing to desktop

[Breadtruck]

I have had the same problem with Stronghold, Ghost Recon, Battle Realms and Operation F'point gold edition where even the original games did not work on my computer until I used a hacked exe from gamecopyworld.

The game installs fine however when you start the executable it comes up with the loader window and then drops back to the desktop. This is very frustrating as the even the backup copy of Stronghold I made using the "AWS" option in CloneCD worked like a charm on my friends computer.

I am running an a7M266 Athlon 1.4GHz, GeForce3 etc (all high specs) on 98SE. I was wondering if it could be the CD-rom and reader. The CD-reader is 40x Mitsubishi DiamondData and the writer is LG 8080B so they are both older types.

Any help greatly appreciated? Older safedisc V2 games work fine but there must be something in the newer versions kicking even original installations back to desktop.

Battle Realms recognised a problem with this which is rectified in the current patch but to date no other company seems interested.