RCT2 starts, goes right back to Windows desktop

Archived from groups: alt.games.rctycoon (More info?)

I've got a problem with RCT2 on my son's machine (AMD Athlon 2600, so
it's not speed). It starts, but rather than seeing a black screen with
the "Loading" line, it gets dumped back to the Windows desktop almost
immediately, but I still see the Loading line (and it eventually
finishes loading and disappears). If I click on the RCT2 program in
the taskbar, it goes back to it for a couple of seconds, and I hear a
little bit of music, then it dumps me back out again! All this time,
the program seems to be looping. Now, strangely, I did manage to get
it to start once. But then the machine crashed (error in an audio
driver) and when I rebooted, I got the error again and can't get back
into the game.

What could the problem be? I've got DirectX 9.0c installed, I'm
thinking that could be related to the system crash, and I wonder if
it's causing this problem as well.

Thanks..