I recently bought Civ4 on Steam, but its giving me serious problems.

At first, I was unable to get the game to even load, as Windows was giving my a Data Executable Protection (or whatever its called)error. I disabled that for Civ4 and managed to get the game to run, and it ran perfectly.

Now however, I can't get the game to start. When I try to start it, the Steam "Loading Civ4" box comes up, then freezes my whole system. I can't bring up the Task Manager and the whole system freezes, requiring me to restart. Starting with steam in both offline and online mode has this problem still.

Is there a way to fix this or have I wasted my money on a game thats just going to damage my computer?

Try going on Steam and right clicking the game shortcut, then click on Properties. Somewhere in there you will see "Verify integrity of game cache". Try using that to see if Steam downloaded it correctly.

I did that and was able to play the game. However today the same problem as before has re-appeared. Verifying game cache does not fix the problem now either.

Maybe a bad disk... Try a full Scandisk.

well, thats your issue right there no, but seriously, I never bought anything off of Steam but can you uninstall it and reinstall or doesn't it work like that?