Welcome to the Lounge, rightcross.
This will confirm what fern has said, but provide a little more detail.
In the top section of this Technical Support forum, there is a "Zoo Tycoon 1 Limits And Suggested Solutions" topic. The first 2 LIMITs in there are what you probably want to read. They concern the limit on ".ztd" files and the limit on ".dll" files. They say what the limits are, the symptoms they cause, and suggestions on how to avoid the limit. If your game would not load at all, it is probably the ".dll" limit. If the game got to the first menu, it is probably the ".ztd" limit.
In order to get your game working again, you do not have to combine ".ztd" files or use combined ".dll" files. You can do that later. To get the game working again, you can move enough user ".ztd" files and user ".dll" files out of your Zoo Tycoon folders until it starts working again. Once it is working again, you can start getting combined ".dll" files and combining ".ztd" files.
This site has a combined ".dll" file in the Object Downloads section. It combined many ".dll" files from here and many ".dll" files from other sites. The Object Downloads section says which ".dll" files you can move out of your Zoo Tycoon folder when you use this one. Two other sites with large combined ".dll" files are Zoo Admin and Zoo Tek. They each have several combined ".dll" files.
Just like fern, I also have a number of downloads from Emma's site and many other non-English sites. Those downloads will work without any problem. Some will have messages in another language. Some even have English messages inside them.
As fern pointed out, many types of user creations do not need ".dll" files. But even those that do have ".dll" files will not hurt your game if you do not have the ".dll" file. All that would happen is that item would not show messages inside Zoo Tycoon. It would still work, just no messages.
Finally, some downloads include Patch programs or Setup programs or ".dll" files bigger than 1.8 mb. All of these can also cause problems. So I recommend that people do not use them. If you have run a Patch or Setup program, you would want to copy the lang0.dll from your Zoo Tycoon CD-ROM into your Zoo Tycoon main folder. If you have any user ".dll" files bigger than 1.8 mb in your Zoo Tycoon main folder, you would want to move them out, but do not move Zoo Tycoon's lang0.dll, lang100.dll, lang200.dll, or lang300.dll.
I hope you get your game working again very soon. Then I hope you have much fun Zoo Tycooning.
