I picked this up the other day. Game runs fine in win 8. i7, nvidia 670m lappy. Until the los arc displays then its more or less umplayable. Ive tried Danny252's and lordhoff's tricks. No joy. Run in a xp vm. Moveable graphics blinked black and colour.
Now i fired a old umm copy of Holligans, storm over europe. It ran the same,
But i turned off sound. It ran perfectly. So turned sound back on, now its flawless.
Now desperados has the same problems and the games came out about the same time.
Im hoping a clever person than i could test or tell me how to turn the sound off?

If your laptop has an additional onboard graphics card, next to the nvidia, I'd try to force the use of this one and deactivate the 670m. Maybe it's a driver/incompatibility problem that doesn't affect the onboard chip.