I have come across a very strange issue.
I just installed aoe3 on my laptop understand that it can't handle aoe3 at it's full glory. When I loaded it up the in game graphics were all jumbled up but the menus still worked. So I played around with the setting untill it finaly looked proper. My issue is the shader setting. When set to low it works well, if set to high the graphics are jumbled and nothing looks as it should be. The problem is when it's set to medium the game kicks me out.
My issue in discovering that setting it to medium will get me kicked out of the game, I no longer am able to change it back to low cause the game crashes every time I get to the menu screen. Is there anyway of reseting defaults outside of game play? I just want to set my shader to low but It won't let me do it. Help

go to
C:Documents and SettingsYour NameMy DocumentsMy GamesAge of Empires 3Users
open the file NewProfile.xml in notepad
find this line
<Setting Name='optiongrfxshaderquality'>2</Setting>
and change it to
<Setting Name='optiongrfxshaderquality'>1</Setting>
and save and hopefully that should do it.
NOTE:
Make a backup of your NewProfile.xml file in case im wrong and it messes it up even more
Disclaimer: i cannot guarantee this will work, its only my best guess, the file i've pointed you at is the correct one to edit though.