Problem with Age of Empires II

I had this same problem. It is some conflict between the game and the
video card driver. The game is mis-reporting it as a DirectDraw issue
because it's an older piece of software that doesn't know what the
problem is.

I'm using a Toshiba laptop and downloaded a third-party driver at
tweakforce.com because Toshiba doesn't provide any updated drivers for
my nVidia card model (Geforce Go 7300). The link for the WinXP version
is: http://www.tweakforce.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=15

It seems to be fine in general and runs the game OK.