Seems a lot of people have been having this problem, but here's one more.

I've had RCT1 & 2 installed on my Windows 8 laptop for awhile. Prior to the forced update to 8.1 they worked fine (aside from some resolution issues seemingly common on laptops with non-standard sized screens, but that's an issue for another time). Today is the first time I've touched either of these games since the 8.1 update and, as many other people have found, RCT1 crashes on startup.

Specifically, it's told me that a feature it needs, DirectPlay, is not installed. On my 4th time getting this message, I was given the option to try & install DirectPlay. I took this option, but the installation was somehow cancelled, not by me, and I was kicked back to the same error message I've been getting every time:

"The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000022). Click OK to close the application."

I have not yet tried RCT2, but considering the two games appear to be functionally identical, I don't foresee having any better luck there.

I've searched for the past hour for a potential solution & have come up with several seemingly conflicting responses. Can anyone who has actually successfully solved this issue please point me to the solution?

Edit: After successfully installing DirectPlay & setting the game to Windows XP (SP2) Compatability Mode as shown in the much circulated Steam tutorial, it looks like it's working now... sort of. The game still crashes on exiting, which feels odd.