Battlefield 2 will not start vista

Further Information:
The Actual game itself came in 5 CD's and is the deluxe edition, which includes special ops (which has the same exact startup problem).

The installation went very smoothly, although i did accidentally click out of what seemed to be something involving "capture rate" i just glanced at it and accidentally clicked out of it. right after that the installation was completed.

The CD is in perfect condition.

my disk drive is external. because my towers built in disk drive had a CD explode in it. -_-

my resolution I have set on my desktop is the maximum.

1: I've never had to use compatability mode for BF2
2: Make sure you run as Administrator (Its an option when you right click the EXE)
3: If that fails, try deleating the into movie (theres enough tutorials on which files need to be removed); might be an issue with that...

I didn't use compatibility mode at first. After it failed to start after a few tries is when I set it to XP service pack 2, yet the same exact issues prevailed.

I ran as an Administrator every time I tried to start it actually (I have a few games that typically have Vista issues, which running as an administrator usually fixes, so through instinct I did it from the start)

I have not tried deleting the Intro Movie, but wont the game try to find the file during the start-up then terminate if it can't?

thanks for your input.

Nope, in BF2, if the movie isn't avaliable, it simply skips it and goes to the menu.

[BTW, a missing sound/movie should NEVER cause a game to crash; its a non-critical error that any programmer should be able to write the two lines of code needed to skip over the movie/music file. But I degress...]