Internal driver error at present. You're likely out of OS Paged Pool Memory! Occurs when I want to join a server or start one on my own. Seems not to appear on very small maps (like district) My 2GB ram didnt change... neither did any of my pc settings which perfectly ran 2.27. Tried some stuff I found using goolge. (Change some settings in registry, avg)
Your graphics driver is failing because I put quite a bit of debug code in parallax shader. Other than that it might be what Steam support website says about it.
One guy on a forum that was getting the same error had a worm called "avpo.exe" Have you scanned for viruses etc?
Try: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6615362/empires/pom_fix.zip .vcs files go to empires/shaders/fxc, .dll to empires/bin
The magic fix I discovered years ago (unless you found that already): http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=690867
What's wrong with heapsize? lockVertexBuffer I just copied after it resolved the issue for some people on forums
I guess even if I used these scripts and the server did too, I would not be able to join the server when the server uses a newer version. But please, return to topic.