I was just about blasted out of my chair when I started up Empire Earth the first time. The two splash screens and the intro movie play the sound at the maximum possible volume, which, because of my hardware setting is painfully loud.

Even after I adjusted the audio settings in-game the game startup sequence still plays at max sound level.
Is there some way to turn this down?

I used the volume mixer in Win7 to turn down all of Empire Earth's audio. Also, you can rename the .bik files under Data\\Movies to stop the intro movies from playing all the time.

Good idea. That worked perfectly.