[Cainehill]

Instead of using full-screen mode, you might consider windowed but with dominions maximized. This gives you almost as much screen real estate as full-screen, but with the benefit of being able to bring up other programs - text editors, email, web browser, whatever. And it should also help ensure that you can see the battery warning.

That said - Dom2's graphic mechanism isn't necessarily Windows-friendly - often the graphics bleed through even when another program is brought to the front, forcing me to minimize dom2 temporarily. (This is with Win98SE, latest NVidia drivers, and I think the latest SDL libraries.)