x_paladin: I have had a similar issue with MOO3 on my Win7 64-bit laptop. I'm no longer trying to troubleshoot the problem, but I'll tell you what my experience was in the hope that it may help you fix your problem. Here goes:
First of all, I have the original install CDs for the game. Secondly, all my crashes always happened right after I had chosen the race and the galaxy had finished generating. The result was a "Unable to find directx surface" error. Thirdly, I did NOT install the game under my Program Files folder. I chose a non-default location for the install. Lastly, I had fresh installed the game, patched it to version 1.25, and installed the strawberry patch all the way to version 1.2.1. All of my "unhandled exception" errors occurred in different addresses but all addresses ended as follows: xxxxdf33.
So I decided to do some tests to see what in the game was causing the directx surface crashes. Here are the results:
1) CD game install only. Started the game. No crash.
2) Patched game to version 1.25. Started the game. No crash.
3) Replaced moo3.exe (ver1.25) with a no-CD moo3.exe (ver1.25). Started the game. No crash.
4) Applied Strawberry mod up to version 1.2.1. DID NOT REPLACE THE EXISTING moo3.exe. Patched existing moo3.exe using the moo3 patcher to apply the strawberry/vanilla mod/patches to the dll file included with strawberry 1.2.1. Started the game. No crash.
5) Replaced the patched no-CD moo3.exe with the moo3.exe supplied with the strawberry mod. Ran the moo3 patcher again. Started the game and......CRASHED.
So at least in my case, the issue was being caused by the moo3.exe I was running after applying strawberry (btw....I also performed the above tests with the Tropico (full) and Vanilla versions and the moo3.exe files included with those mods also caused the crash to occur). I had no option but to revert back to the official 1.25 patch version of the moo3.exe which left me without a large portion of the mod's benefits that I was interested in. So I shelved the game again. Probably for good this time.
I hope some of this information helps you more than it did me. Cheers.
I located the file through reading other threads here...thank you for your help in this post. It will come in very handy to keep problems down to a minimum. Thanks