I have SMAC and Alien Crossfire. I am running WIndows ME on a brand new machine, and when I start the Game
I get a message the axstart.exe has performed an illegal operation.
Had the same thing ten days ago on a new Dell laptop running ME.
I got it solved by dragging the terran.exe and terranx.exe icons on to my desktop and starting from there (ie bypassing AXstart)
Also helps to disable the opening movies (see the readme.txt for the insertion you need to make into the alphacentauri.ini text - of course you need to have gotten the game started to get the .ini file set up in the first place)