I have never played the 10th anniversary edition, but I've been looking for it so bad. My first introduction to the Settlers series was the second iteration, so I've been looking forward to get some time to play this.

Installed and ready to play I hit the icon, and the screen goes black, then shows the desktop, and then black again, and then the black shows up and minimizes down to the taskbar.

The icon rests there, and when I click it again to sort of open the game, the same thing happens. The screen goes black, and minimizes.

Don't know what to do?

I'm on Windows 8.1

This worked for me:

Change your Windows resolution to 1024 x 768.

Launch the game.

In the game settings change your resolution to 1920 x 1080 or whatever you normally use for Windows.

Exit the game.

Change your Windows resolution back to normal.

Launch the game again and it should work.

Thank you so much. Had the same problem, also on Win8.1, and this worked for me.