Have you ever figured it out? I encountered the same problem. I played the game around year ago for short while and had no such problems but now everything is grey.

I tried to ignore the grey screen and, after about 5 minutes, my new 2560x1080 monitor makes a big POP noise like my old TV I was using did when it blew. There is also a flicker across the screen at the same time. The game runs fine as long as I use the original maps, but I tried playing Metal Heck 2, and the game was so slow/3-5 second lag frames, it was terrible, and the flicker& pop from screen also.

It only happens on total annihilation

I have this exact same problem and yet to fix it on Windows 7. I've tried everything: about every single compatibility option, changing TA.ini, mods, resolution, display settings... Nothing fixed it.

The only fix is creating a shortcut with -window argument to force window mode. However, this break many mods and the community patch, and also does not work with GameRanger.

Dxwnd works with the mods, however I couldn't get it to work with GameRanger. GR still launches the original .exe without it being 'intercepted' by DxWnd.

So basically, cannot play on GameRanger through windows 7. I managed to set it up in Ubuntu though and it works flawlessly, online and offline.

Interestingly, TA looks fine when I launch window in Safe Mode (however it's not playable since it's safe mode, but the graphics look fine). But yeah I've spent too much time on this already. If someone has a fix to play TA on Gameranger on Win7, fire ahead. I'm on Nvidia too, GeForce GTX 670 with up to date drivers. I think that may be part of the issue.

Yikes, that's not something I would like to have happen.

I have fairly recent Nvidia card as well and I played the game sometime last year (or late 2019) and it worked back then. It was also Nvidia card but much older and naturally drivers were older as well as they were from that time.

For me it works when I runs with normal colours when windowed as well.

I think I tried all solutions I found online pertaining problems with colours but none of them worked and none of them mentioned greysih colour, only weird colour pallete. I think the Safe mode isn't running your graphics drivers and that's why it is working fine there so yeah, I am quite sure it has something to do with Nvidia drivers. While I am not bothered by GAmeRanger not working there, I don't think it is worth the hassle to switch to safe mode just to play this.

Just had the same problem. I got it to work using dgVoodoo2 ( using the x86 D3D DLLs ).
I suggest to use something like "Scaling-Mode : Keep Aspect Ratio" in the dgVoodoo configurator.

Oh i had a problem with TA where everything went weird, Turned out that i had my desktop pictures changing every so often and every time it changed, it screwed TA, When i made my desktop just one single picture instead of lots of changing pictures, it fixed it.

So if you have something going on in windows, Keep in mind that it might disturb TA.

Solution for Windows 7:

1) Make an executable Shortcut with a '-d' in the Target executable line..like this
"D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\steamapps\common\Total Annihilation\TotalA.exe" -d
2) Set Win95 compatibility mode for the TA executable.
3) Start game (starts in a window) go into the game's options and set Display to the max allowable resolution.Exit game.
4) Do a registry edit via : RegEdit, then find, Hkey/current user/software/cavedog entertainment/Total Annihilation.
5) Change the Displaymodewidth & displaymodeheight size to 1920 & 1280 (decimal) respectively, or whatever your max screen size is.