I keep getting the "terran.exe has stopped working" error message every time I try to open the game. It shows the Firaxis logo briefly, goes to black like it's about to load the intro cinematic, sits on the black screen for 5-10 seconds, and then gives me that message. I saw an earlier thread that suggested changing my desktop resolution to a setting where both numbers are multiples of 8; tried that and it did the exact same thing.

Anyone have any idea what is causing this issue?

When I had this problem, it was down to file permissions. I'd installed as an admin, but was playing as a non-admin user. Set permissions on the game folder (and sub-folders) for everyting except Full Control for all users/groups that you expect to play, and try again. This was on XP. I don't know if the same issues might exist for Vista+.