After fiddling, it seems the issue is the Steam overlay. While disappointing, the problem is easy enough to solve. Makes communication more difficult (I use Steam chat to coordinate games and such), but at least everything works now, right?
SquireZed
The issue I am suffering from is based on the Steam downloaded version of Trinity. I first launched trinity, and it ran about 5 minutes at a black screen, then I killed it and restarted. Nest, I launched it and it ran ten minutes at the black screen, and I alt-tabbed out and got a minidump. Same happened on the Entrenchment expansion and the base game itself. From what I've seen, most of the issues come from either bad files (verified install) or mods (none installed). So I have no clue w