Windows 7 and Battle for Middle Earth II

I've looked all over the net and have been unable to get this game to work despite many people saying they have gotten their versions to work.

I have Windows 7 Home Premium.

I have installed the game, and ran it from it's desktop shortcut. It worked.

The problem occurs after installing the 1.06 patch. After the patch, the desktop shortcut will only show the splash screen, and then nothing else happens.

Task manager will show lotrobfme2.exe, game.dat, and ~e5.0001. (All programs that run when it's correct), but no activity.

The rub is that if I run the autoplay from the DVD itself and click "Play" it will launch like nothing is wrong.

I am wondering if anyone here has any insight as to what settings I am missing?

I've tried all combinations of compatability modes I can think of. I've tried manually creating options.ini files.

Many people report they can get the game to work, but I have not been able to achieve the same.

Anyone have any insight? There's tons of posts about it, but nothing in any that I've read has helped so far.

are there any extensions of the shortcut command line?

There are a only a few.

-xres
-yres

(For forcing screen resolution)

-noshellmap

(Removing looping background)

There is also -mod, but that is used to install player mods of the game. I have tried both of the above lines. Forcing display to 1024/768, 800/600, and native 1680/1050. With and without the noshell command.

I wish I could find out what the "Play" button of the autoplay GUI is launching, because that works perfectly without any compatability modes at all.