I have nearly the same problem! One year ago I had Win Me on my PC and I played without any problems Tiebrian Sun on the inetrnet servers. And now I have a new PC and of course Windows XP. The game runs on WInXP but when I want to update the game to the latest version, there is a problem - a small window appears and says "patchgrabber has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." I looked for the patch in google and found this site (it is great btw ) and I downloaded manually the patch. And of course I installed it. The game is now updated - i can save the skirmish games, the bugs are fixed... BUT there is the same unpleasant problem - when I click on Internet, the game says some kind of : "a new update available". And when I click "yes" (to install it AGAIN?) the game dissapear - it just quits to Desktop! Last summer I didn't have that problem. I tried what the adminstrator recommended, but it didn't help
I'll be very hapy, if you can help me! Thank you and sorry for my bad english.