I bought RCT2 a long time ago. I got things working by doing the usual compatibility mode, disabling effects, running as administrator and what not. However today I suddenly started getting another problem.

Whenever I start RCT2, in the same way I've always done it, it changes resolution brings up a loading bar, as it always had, but then minimizes the game and puts me back at the desktop. If I click in the running program from the task bar, it does the same thing: changes resolution as if it is going to bring up the game, plays just a bit of the music, then drops me back at the desktop again. I promise I didn't change anything in my computer.

If I do the windowed hack, as mentioned in other places on this forum, the game loads fine; but, I don't like playing in windowed mode. It is much harder to place and select things at such a high resolution.

I tried reinstalling the game but that didn't solve anything. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Fwiw, running Win 7 64bit.

So I solved my issue and wanted to post my findings in case it can help anyone else.

So today I realized that RTC2 wasn't the only game affected. The same thing happened with World of Goo. So I started searching around the Internet (search terms: "game can't fullscreen automatically minimizes") and found a few places where people had the same problem with other games.

The common ground seemed to be that there was another program preventing certain fullscreen games from entering fullscreen. So I started closing programs and trying to start the game in between each one. I got lucky and one my first shot found that closing Adobe Creative Cloud application allowed my games to enter fullscreen without problems. The weird thing is that I was able to restart Adobe Creative Cloud and my games still worked properly. So I guess the app just got into a weird state.

So my suggestion to other people with a similar problem is to start closing non-essential programs and see if one of them was causing the problem. Hope that helps.