problem with Rome Total War

So I have been reinstalling Rome Total War (yes, the first one) on this pc through Steam. However, I have a problem which I can't find anything about anywhere else:

The loading times between screens takes awfully long. From the moment hit play to the moment it starts playing the intro vid, easily five to ten minutes have gone by. Once the vid is over, it takes easily about three minutes for it to load the loadscreen. I have actually closed the game when it started to load the main menu because I didn't feel like waiting another couple of minutes. Task manager did say RTW is not responding when I opened it.

I have played RTW for at least several hundreds of hours on this pc in the past. The only difference is that I have 2 TB hard drive now and use windows 8.1. Might anyone know what the problem is?

Thanks for any help given in advance.

That's weird, did you try playing it in compatibility mode? Although you shouldn't need to...

Tried that too, also ran it as administrator, both made no difference.

I had this problem with civilization 5, which I also bought via steam. Terrible long loading times, searched the forums, google, support - nothing helpful found. Then I checked my outgoing connections and there it was: a update launcher of some kind, trying to connect to steam, hindering the game to start properly. The launcher was not able to establish a connection (server timeout) but it tried over and over again. I couldn't disable it, but after a while I found the switch. Somewhere in your steam terminal there is an option to deactivate the auto-connect to steam. And boom - everything was fine. Hope that helps.