ACK! v1.41 crashes in WINme

[Suicide Junkie]

SE4 is crashing every time when I run v1.41 under Windows Millenium Edition!

It runs perfectly fine on the Win98 machine sitting 2cm away, though. SE4 v1.35 works perfectly fine under WinME.

I've tried downloading the patch twice, but it works fine on 98.

What happens is that every AI message that I recieve crashes the game. I see the pic of the race and a "message from the XYZ Empire:" text, but then there is a random pixel pattern beside that, and sometimes I get half of an interlaced race pic covering the galaxy map on the bottom left of my log.

There is no crash until I look at the log message, so if I only read the non-message entries I'm ok.

This sucks, since my w98 machine is half the speed, and my brother uses it all the time.

PS: Yes, I know its a crappy bloatware OS, but it came with the machine.