Ok, I had Rome: Total War installed with patch 1.3 and it ran great. But then I downloaded and installed Rome: Total Realism... it sucked... I guess it reverts your game back to version 1.2 because I have a seriously bad mouse trailing problem before patch 1.3. This had that same problem. There was no option to uninstall the mod so I did a full uninstall of the game then deleted all the leftovers(game saves and screenies.) I wanted to reinstall and it worked alright. I installed patches 1.1 and 1.2. When I get to 1.3 it tells me that I already installed it. I made a search on my HDD for Activision and RTW and patches and Creative Assembly and deleted all the files... after uninstalling the game of course. I then did a fresh reinstall of the game and got the same problem. What's up? RTR really screwed it up... This is on my X2 3800+ BTW.
I heard of that happening before, it can be sorted with some registry editing, but, it may be worthwhile trying a later patch ie 1.5, that may well install easily.
Ok... took a while... but I'm sure I cleared it out! I tried the patch and doink! It don't work. I then realized I needed to reinstall RTW before I can use the patches again... so I do! It works great and I can finally get to see my units' status again!(yay)