Spring RTS Engine

I had 2 working versions of the ORIGINAL TA program that will no longer load since the installation of the spring engine and the spring lobby. i know they worked just fine BEFORE the install because I've been playing them recently. One is OTA and the other has the Absolute Annihilation mod applied. FYI, OTA was the last program installed prior to Spring.

Trying to launch either program (OTA or AA) gives me a black screen (with the TA cursor) for about 2 seconds, then reverts back to the desktop with the program running in the background, and leaving all my desktop icons out of place. Trying to restore the program from the taskbar gives the same result.

I've searched for similar forum posts and read the faq. I even tried Google... I can't believe I'm the only person experiencing this. Is Spring creating file associations or registry entries that would conflict with TA?
In case you're wondering I DO own working copies of the OTA disks.

my system
AMD Athlon XP 2600 (OC'd to 2GHz)
1GB DDR
Radeon series 9600 (128MB)
Win XP Pro SP3

The only associations are to sdz, sd7, maybe whatever replays use. The only other registry entries are install-related.
I can't think of any possible way for Spring to mess with a TA install.

as long as you didn't ignore the express instructions in the installer and install spring to the TA directory there is no way that spring would corrupt the install of TA... meanwhile it's very vaguely possible that it could have done something weird to your graphics drivers or directX or operating system or something like that... my first suggestion would be to reboot your computer (which, having working in tech support for 5 years can't be assumed)... second I would suggest you build a "fast install" disk for your original TA (ripping the content files out of the install disks and combining them into one "run from the HD" package not only makes the game run faster but makes it easier to install in the future... seeing as TA predates things like putting stuff in the registry acctually matering you can safely just burn a successful install to a back-up CD)... third I will leave the hard part of troubleshooting to the rest of the more knowledgeable folks on the forum but rest assured, Spring did not do anything to your TA install... so the troubleshooting you need to be doing is PC troubleshooting...

(there are a lot of places to find re-pack instructions but this one was the first I found http://switeck.tauniverse.com/tahelp.htm )

Firstly, thanks for the replies..

Yes, I've rebooted since then.

I also thought it was a stretch that registry entries or associations would be an issue, but I thought I would ask anyway.

I do have all 3 installs (OTA, AA, and Spring) in their own respective folders, so installing one over the other surely isn't the issue.

I've already got a repacked OTA install.

I suppose i'll just have to reinstall and see what happens. I'll report back when I have a result.

Reinstall worked..

Thanks again.