One of the primary things i like doing in RCT is making my own landscapes, but i don't always have the time to completely finish one i've started all at once. And sometimes i want to use a lovingly crafted land for more than one scenario. But when i go to 'load landscape' in the editor the whole game crashes. and if i do the trick you use to load saved games, where you load it from the file folder, it says "scenario already installed" and won't let me at it.

it doesn't make the game unplayable, but it does limit one of my favorite activities.

(i'm already running it as an administrator, in win98 compatibility mode. on windows 8.1)

Help a gal out?

The issue might be connected to Windows' DWM (Desktop Windows Manager). Maybe the load dialog of RCT is crashing because of an incompatibility. Unfortunately since Win 8 there's no longer an option in the compatibility settings to turn it off. You could try to kill the DWM.exe process before starting the game, but it's a bit tricky, because Windows won't allow it.
You can use ProcessExplorer to suspend "winlogon.exe" and then kill "DWM.exe". Start ProcessExplorer as an Administrator (right-click => Run as...), look for these processes, right-click them and choose Suspend or Kill Process. Reboot your system after playing to get everything running again.