Rome Total War Problem Need Help

Hey i just bought the gold pack yesterday installed it... played it for a bit then turned my computer off. I came home today turned my computer on to play it but everytime i try to start the game it comes up minimized in the corner... if i click the minimized icon it comes up for about a second with a black screen and then minimizes again, the same problem also occurs in the BI expansion... it was really fun and Iwas looking forward to playing it.... this is really annoying me, please help.

System Specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 2.13GHz
XFX GeForce 8800GTS 320mb
2046MB DDR2RAM
250GB Seagate Barracuda
Windows XP Pro Edition

Any help would be much appreciated as i really want to play this game.

Second step is to reinstall the game. If that doesnt help, then make sure you run it from the launcher that comes up when you pop in the cd. If that doesnt work, delve around in the program files folder and run RomeTW.exe, found in the rome total war folder. If none of this works, to help you further I need some information about your computer

Alright, reset the computer then as soon as it started up i put the cd in and it worked! how strange... the only thing i can think that was different to my last start up was that i didn't have the cd in the drive when i turned the computer on.

Thanks very much for your help!