i think the vast majority of the problems with compatibility are illegal win xp copies that do not have the official ms patches and service packs. as once i had the service pack installed i had no troubel at all, didn't even need to use the compatibility thingy.

if the autorun is not functining then it sounds like its a dvd-rom which might like the older cd's which require a much higher 'disk speed' than a dvd rom requires, or a bad/dirty disk. a problem i always ran into when i trie dto play Xcom: apocalypse is that the dvd rom on my puter was listed as too slow to run the game and i had to cheat on some files to get it to behave.