I have read about 4 of these topics and there is never any useful information about this problem in there. There is never a response from the Moderators and nobody gives any helpful advice. I've sent a request to EA Help Desk but I'm sure you can guess how far I've gotten with that (I haven't even gotten a copy+pasta reply yet).

Ok, I played Spore for about a week straight. I love this game. Well, I did until I couldn't play it anymore. After about a week it just stopped working. It will load the SporeApp.exe application, I can see it in Taskmanager, it even gives me a black screen and changes the mouse pointer graphic. But it won't progress beyond that black screen. I don't even get to the Maxis screen. I can Ctrl-Alt-Del out of it without having to restart, thankfully. I've noticed other people aren't as lucky. What can I do and how do I know this ridiculous crap won't happen again?

I'm using Vista Ultimate 64 edition. 8800 GTX, 2 gigs of ram, FX-62 processor. I've turned off UAC so it isn't a matter of setting it to run as Admin (which it's set to do anyway). I've updated my drivers as well. I've tried replacing that DLL file but to no avail. EA Support desk won't give me a response at all. This is stupid for a game that literally just came out to be so buggy. I understand Spore is a complex game with many new features that haven't been seen in gaming programming before but that doesn't excuse what has happened. I just paid money to buy a game I can no longer play and it hasn't even been a full month yet. Unnacceptable.

It would be SUPER nice if some Maxis or EA suits would explain why the hell their game is so borked.

I had the same problem with my game, it worked fine then all of a sudden it refused to run. After a LOT if searching for help around the forums I came across what turned out to be my solution. Browse to the following location:-

Computer -- Local Disk (C: ) -- Users -- (username) -- AppData -- Roaming -- Spore -- Games -- Game0

You will probably have to "show all files" in order to get there. In that folder is a file called Stars.db (you may not see the .db extension), delete this file but make a backup of it elsewhere first. Deleting this file will loose all your saved games, hence why you should make a backup just in case. Now run the game. For me deleting the stars.db file sorted out my problem of the game not running and given the choice of not being able to play the game or loose my saves ... well loosing saves is nothing compared to having a £40 game you can't do anything with

Ok, just in case you can't find the location of the stars.db file as listed above you can just use the built in search feature in Windows to find it. Only delete the stars.db file from the Game0 folder. Again be aware you WILL loose all saved games so you might want to make a backup of that file first

Let me know how it goes.