I'm trying to run Age of Wonders Shadow Magic, freshly downloaded from GOG last night, on a Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium PC.

What happens is that after the splash window disappears and the game switches to exclusive fullscreen, I get a fraction of a second of audio and then nothing. The screen remains black. Alt-tabbing and doing something else for a while then going back shows that nothing changed.

After disabling the intro video in the setup, no short audio blip at the beginning, but otherwise unchanged.

After setting the display mode to window in the setup, instead of a black screen, I get a blank window. Dragging another window around it shows that its buffer is never refreshed -- I get ghost images of the other window getting moved.

Enabling or disabling the use of Direct3D in the setup has no noticeable effect.

Using AoWSM.exe instead if AoWSMCompat.exe changes nothing, just don't get the security prompt but otherwise, same lack of results.

Searching the internet for similar problems show that some people had something like that but only after clicking on something on the main menu. I don't even get to the main menu.

Also after fully uninstalling it, the installer doesn't work anymore. After ticking the EULA box and hitting the install button, I just get that:

If you run the program as an administrator, do you still find the same error? (right click exe file for option). Does the map editor work?

After rebooting the computer, I could finally reinstall the game and now it works.