This is on a laptop running XP, so it's not Vista related.

Every time I try to start it up, the game shows the little "Evil Genius" over yellow background window, flashes to a loading screen, and then errors and closes, all within about 10 seconds.

I'm told that "EvilGeniusExeStub-Release.exe has encountered an error", and my number lock is turned on, for some reason.

Is there a way to fix this?

EDIT: The game still forces the num lock whenever I switch to its window, and this is annoying because my laptop has the number pad "over" the actual keyboard, but it is suddenly otherwise working.

EDIT2: For some reason, some character models are just pure white- the main character and Number 2 are both affected.