I had the same issue with win 8 dident boot the game up just vaniched from the desktop. But i got it working thx to this thread. But what did i do diffrent.
Like I said, whether the design came through as expected, the online mechanism in C&C 4 is significantly less to do with anti-piracy, and more do to with persistent stat/experience tracking pertaining to SP/MP play.
Used the task manager and closed the updater.exe (cant remember what the correct name was but i had them around 5-12 prosesses with the same name. This way you can find them.
Locaded the game exe at C: Program Files (x86) Origin Games Command Conquer 4 Tiberian Twilight CNC4Game.exe and with the right mouse botton set the compatiblity options to administrator and win xp sp3 3. After that the game starts fine from orion software or from the desktop.
At the start i tested reinstall, repair game, update game, seting the compatiblity options on the desktop shortcut but all that dident work! Thanks to all for the bread crump trails to follow. While following some of those trails (and hitting a few dead-ends), I finally got the game to launch.
After killing the multiple 'LauncherUpdater' processes from the task manager, I went to the directory where C&C4 is installed (right click on the desktop icon, click open file location). Instead of CNC4.exe like the icon pointed to, I ran CNC4Game.exe just to see what would happen. It brought me to the Origin login screen, but also to a CNC4 game login screen. I logged in about 5 times (it seemed - not any errors, it just kept asking me on differing screens), set up a 'persona' and then saw the opening movie.