i'm using windows vista 32 bit and my preformance number thing is 3.4 for sound: sigmatel high definition audio CODEC and for the video card: mobile intel(R) 965 express chipset family. i'm having a problem that nothing can seem to fix. i start up sproe from the ea download manager, the screen goes blank as usual. and then when the cursor changes from the windows one to the spore one it closes and a window pops up saying it stopped working.

i've tried updating drivers, installing stuff, uninstsalling and reinstalling the spore. and it worked fine for the first week while all the normal backround programs were running so i don't get what it is.

please help. it's getting really frustrating

SPore will not load after installation.

I meet the min requirements and have updated my video driver.
WindowsXP
Pentium4 3ghz
2gig ram
plenty HD space
nvidia 6800

After installing I go to load the program... nothing happens. If I look in Task Manager it shows an instance of sporeapp.exe though. Nothing more happens.

I've tried updating my DirectX, my video drivers, reinstalling the game, restarting my computer. I also tried starting the game with my virus protection off. Because the first couple times it told me that my computer needs to be connected to the internet... which it was. But it has since stopped giving me that error message. In addition to all that I've tried it with my router removed.

The other night I installed the game on my girlfriend's computer (lower stat computer) and the game runs ok.

I just now installed the game on a different drive on my computer... nothing still. Just loads Sporeapp.exe but nothing else. EA Download Manager works and connects like before... though I only purchased Creature Creator that way.

What am I missing?

I am at a point in the space phase where I have had to resort to violence with a very aggressive neighbor. I have cornered them at their homeworld, and each time I go there at some point just when I destroy one of their cities with the mini bomb the game crashes to desktop. This wasn't happening when I used mini bomb at any other time.

Some possibilities are there are more cities on their home planet, so more objects to track, and there's some sort of conflict. Thats all I can really think of.

I keep getting an error saying "The igxprd32 display driver stopped working normally".

For those experiencing the between-stages crash (I was plagued by crashes to the desktop every time I tried to evolve cell to creature phase):

Per a recommendation by another user, I have been switching to windowed mode (press alt-enter) before saving the creature and clicking to progress. For whatever reason, this ended my constant crashing and now I can play again!

For the record, I'm running Vista Home Premium on a new dual-core laptop with (gasp) Intel integrated graphics. All graphics options in game set to "low" but max resolution for my system (1200x800). Tried turning Aero off but have discovered it doesn't make a difference for me.

None of these have solved a problem a few of us are getting. I know this is a crash issue post, but it looks like attention of the higher ups is focused here for now.

problem post - http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/787.page#5554

I have been playing around with the files by swapping them out with new game data. It looks like the problem is a game issue and not a hardware issue seeing as multiple people have had this problem with no fixes from reinstalling, updating drivers, rebooting, etc. Please help with this problem because i need my spore fix.

picture of the problem for reference: Hud is still there, space is black, sound works.
http://img145.imageshack.us/my.php?image=92569218jc2.jpg

So, I updated my drivers yesterday but it said that it wouldn't take effect until I restarted the computer. The game ran fine regardless, and I shut it off last night. Now I come back today, and what do you know, every couple of minutes after continued gameplay, when I zoom into a planet or go into a menu, it runs a risk of just freezing graphics-wise. I can move my mouse about and I hear the sounds of buttons being highlighted, but the game is pretty much frozen.

I'm running an ATI Radeon X300, and a form of Windows XP, I could check which specific version if someone told me how.

From what I'm gathering it's a graphics issue, but if it worked pre-driver update and now it doesn't, I have no idea whether I should revert or if there's a different issue.

I don't know how to find what I had before, but I do know I just went from whatever drivers I had to the ATI Catalyst 8.8 drivers

phisto510 wrote:
Nearly identical crash here, Home colony and another colony get attacked simultaneously, I defend the home colony but lose the other colony. After picking up loot and repairing cities as soon as I try to exit the world and before I can save, slight difference here, on my machine it goes to a black screen, minimizes to windows mode and a message pops up about an error, after searching the internet a message says an error caused the program to stop working correctly, then when I close that message it closes spore. This has been repeated about 10 times so far.

Sometimes I get the black screen, other times I just get flashes. Alt-Tabbing still lets me go to the desktop and back just fine. On the old forum I found something where someone suggested selling all the turrets in the cities and destroying the ones that you can't sell back.

Ok, so I went ahead and tried that....didn't work. There seems to be another thread regarding the zooming out of homeworld issue. Here is the link to that forum/stuff that poor person has tried.

http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/151.page

bwbullough wrote:For reference here are a list of things I have tried to fix the "zoom-out-of-homeworld" crash. None have worked:

Running in different resolutions
Running Spore as administrator
Running Spore in XP compatibility mode
Fixing cities before zooming out
Not fixing cities before zooming out
Destroying all turrets
Running the saved game on a different computer
Zooming out slowly
Zooming out quickly
reducing graphics settings
Increasing graphics settings
Changing all building and vehicle models while on the home planet
Playing offline
Playing online
Screaming at the computer
deleting all files in the MVJCache folder
removing all quests prior to zoom-out
running windowed
running full-screen
changing graphics cache size
altering planet color
renaming cities
renaming the home planet
disabling sound
changing the species clothing style

my comp is XP with ATI grfx card. its all good and dandy. np ever anytime for anything ever. my hardware is perfect. ok. drivers, soundcard, etc all fine.
so, i played spore from cell to space for 4 days. i was in space for 3 days, and i took over about 1/10 of the universe. dozens of allies and colonies. hundreds of battles and terraforming. never had a crash once. not once ever.
on day 4, sep 12th, the login error appeared. i played offline anyway. for hours, no bugs, glitches, or errors. well, i went onto a orange spice unclaimed T1 planet and finished the T2 food web, and added 2 enemy sentients (deer man) and 5 of my own race sentients. i went out to the planet in the same system, which was yellow spice T2 and bought a colony insta pack (creates a city) and saved right before entering the surface of the unclaimed planet.
the second i entered the planet, i got multiple attack alerts. the game froze, so i dont know what the alerts were, and it crashed to desktop. well, after starting spore up again just fine, i loaded the save game. it did the loading screen (you may encounter, reticulating spines...) the game loaded for a split second and crashed to desktop yet again. rinse and repeat 20 times. i lost 30+ hours of the game.
tech support is weak and vague. begging for help for the past 48 hours, no help. plz help.
ANY NEW GAME I SAVE IN ANY STAGE WILL NEVER LOAD AGAIN. i can play for 10 hours nonstop, but the moment i save and stop playing, that game will NEVER LOAD ever again.
NONE OF MY SAVES LOAD. my game is unplayable.
its not fair that the retailers bear the brunt of our collective rage, and the developers are untouched by the violence.
MY GAME WORKS PERFECTLY, BUT MY SAVES DONT SAVE!!!!!!

I was playing my first game a few days ago and I had just reached the tribal stage, when I had to quit without savin (I was going to be late to work...) Now, I can't even get past the loading screen for tribal stage, I've tried multiple times and the furthest I got was 2 creatures appearing in the possible creatures I may meet place at the bottom. I tried uninstalling the game and then reinstalling it and that didn't seem to work. I also downloaded the latest drivers, and I think I am now up to date with those too.

I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit if that lends any help. I can't seem to figure out why it won't let me play the tribal stage anymore, I've tried and failed about 13 times today and other days. I end up having to use the task manager to end the program.

I fixed it by using the 177.92 fix.
Thanks very much, I'm now happily playing SPORE!

So far the only bug I've come across in my game is one in the Space stage. When a rival race took one of my colonies I was unable to get back to the world. Every time I tried to enter the planet to take it back the screen would go black with the loading cursor and then it would crash to the desktop with a "Spore encountered a problem and needs to close" message (I have Windows XP SP3).

To fix it I ended up making an alley take the planet. After they conquered the planet I was able to return to the planet and leave without problems. I started a trade route and I mean to buy it back... but I was wondering if anyone has discovered a better fix for this? As I mentioned before I don't have any problems otherwise. I'm not very computer savvy so I'm wondering if there was another way to fix it.

I keep my computer updated and it's fairly new, so I don't think that's part of the problem.

Whenever I try to start the game the computer restarts. What is Wrong?The computer is a microsoft windows XP Professional version 2002 service pack three,Dell Latitude D630 Intel Core duo CPU 2.20GHz prcessor, 1.00 GB of RAM and I dont know how to check the video card.

My laptop was crashing whenever I went from one phase to another. I fixed it by going into Spore's video settings and turning the cache down to 512mb. No more crashing.

"Game needs access to the internet in order to verify ownership of this game. Please ensure that your computer is online and try again."

To all of you complaining about ONLY being able to play the "maxis content" be happy you've been able to play your game at all!! I had to unistall Spore, and install the 'trial' just to get a 'profile' so that I could even post a message in HOPES of some help...to acctually maybe be able to play the game at all!!!

Okay, so I got Spore on Thurday morning, and installed it when I got home. When I click on the link to start it (it doesn't matter which link, shortcut, start>all programs, or C:/....blah, blah) I get the same message posted above. (in case there's going to be some smart a$$ out there...I am using the internet to leave this message on the computer trying to play spore on...in other words I HAVE A CONNECTION) I started looking around trying to figure out why, and came accross LOTS of things to "try" (and I have left messages at EA for help with what is happening) So I have uninstalled/re-installed both with and w/o EAdownload manager, with and w/o desktop shortcut, turned off firewalls (yes more then one) allowed the game access, comletly turned off all virus protection, ended all back ground tasks, ran 2 different tracking things for internet (the pinging thing, everything seems ok), ummm....logged in as Admin.whole time, some CMD thing, hmmm....updated network stuff, let's see, I've been loooking on the web for help these last few days. I did get 2 separate replys from EA help, the first was asking for screenshot of error message and acct info, the second told me....."make sure your not trying to install on a 4th computer, it can only be installed on a max of 3".....OK, just trying to get it to work on 1...that would be great!!....also it said that "You do not have all of your old EA accounts linked to your new EA
account"....I haven't been able to even get to the part where I put in a password/screenname, how would it even know, and I only have 1 Ea acct.....and it said "maybe some file is corrupted, find file blah, blah, blah and delete it".......there was no file there to be deleted.....and my favorite "help tip" Your system clock may be set incorrectly".....and then it proceded to tell me how to set the correct time zone/ and time on computer..... .... .....aside from the fact that It's definatly set correctly....what does that have to do with it not connecting!?!?

Ok so I have.....
* Win XP w/serv pk 2
*3GHz Pent 4
*1012MB Ram
*256MB video card
*104 GB avble on HD
*nvidia geforce 6200 series

SO even though I have tried several things, maybe even some not listed above....can't remember it all, I would LOVE some help here...THANK YOU!! Any Ideas??