Age of Empires throwing 'unable to start' errors

[Tootles]

Just wondering if anyone on here knows anything about this. AoE 1 (and Gold) and II are all throwing 0xc0000022 errors when I try to start them on my laptop. It's running Windows 10, though I highly doubt this is anything to do with it as the games all work my desktop, which also runs W10 (same architecture and build, too).

I Googled 0xc0000022 and was given to believe that it was something to do with permissions, so I looked into the permissions of the .exe files. No problems there. I grabbed a copy of Exescope and looked through the .dlls it had listed as dependancies - likewise, no problems with them, they're all present and as they should be.

So I'm puzzled. The files work fine on my desktop, but I want to retire it and just use it for watching downloaded films/TV on, not having any games or software of any real description on it - it's a museum-age VAIO all-in-one (which actually runs W10 very well but struggles with some bigger software), and my laptop's a year-old midrange machine to which I'm migrating everything.

Does anybody have *any* idea what else might be causing this issue...?

Thanks.

[The Distractor]

0xc0000022 is STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED. It could be some antimalware program detecting them?

[Tootles]

I heard about this one too - I don't have any antimalware software installed on my machine other than Windows Defender. I've disabled that temporarily to see if it makes a difference but it was just the same. I'll have another look through the machine to see if I've installed anything without looking anyway.

Edit: checked, and I've not installed any software to do that, and I've looked again at Windows Defender. I'm confyoozd.

[Tootles]

OK, I've looked at it with procmon and this is what I see:



I've looked at the apparently-offending registry key and found there to be nothing there of note - and found it to be identical to the same key on the desktop, on which AoE works. I've run procmon on the other machine too, and while the same ACCESS DENIED error is being thrown there, it's executing as normal. So now I'm just stumped.

Edit: got it to work. It wanted DirectPlay to be installed but it wasn't triggering the installer when I tried to open it (like it does on other machines) so I had to install it through cmd and then use compatibility mode to make it work with my laptop's display drivers. Eugh.