I, Marx, am a novice in matters of hardware system specs, scarcely fit to measure gigabytes.

Imagine my surprise when 3danalyze offered to whisk away the nebulous "needs pixel shader 2.0" that has heretofore kept my poor laptop from running EU3.

Playing around with the system a bit, I find I can get as far as the main menu, at which point the affair invarably crashes to the ever familiar desktop. Is there some way I can overcome this?

My present graphics card, should it be necessary, is an NVIDIA Geforce GO 6150.

With many thanks.

There is a link to the 3DAnalyze user guide in my signature, have a look

Thank you for that.

Having some idea how to use the program, I still find that the game crashes just before reaching the main menu, though I have indeed checked 'emulate pixel shader caps', as well as 'skip pixel shader 2.0.'
Have I missed something?

It's correct, unfortunately with some games 3DAnalyze is unuseful.
Upgrade to the latest Nvidia drivers and do some trial & error with 3DA, good luck.