Hi there
Me again! Shortly after leaving my problem in the post above, I found the fix on an obscure French forum!!! (Well, it worked for me anyway!)
If you have a situation, like me, where you played the game a few months ago with no problem and are now trying it again and finding it goes back to desktop after the intro movies, just try copying all the files in the Bin folder to the main directory with the Vampire.exe in it! I did this and viola! The game worked! You can see from the other post how many things I tried, but this did the trick - what a relief!
Hope this does the trick for you, if you have the same problem!