I bought it from The Adventure Shop. It seemed to install fine. I set the compatibility mode to Windows 98. Immediately when launching, the screen goes all black and the standard Windows "Amerzone.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." dialog comes up. I have to additionally kill the program with Windows Task Manager after that.

I'm running XP on a Thinkpad T61p... it wouldn't surprise me if the fact that it's a dual core machine was a problem, but I have no way to know for sure.

Has anyone else experienced an immediate crash? Is there a way around it?

Amerzone runs perfectly on my WinXP system without using any compatibility modes. A Google search seems to indicate that compatibility is needed with Vista but not WinXP.

You might be right about the dual core or it may be a graphics chip issue.

I remember having a similar problem when playing this game, although I did manage to play a few minutes in before it began stuttering and stalling.

From your Start menu, go to All Programs and then the drop-down title for Amerzone. Hopefully you'll see two video choices in which to run the game. Try both, and see if one works better than the other. I switched my choice and the game ran perfectly from then on.