Guys i am mailing with the support of EA, and they came with this solution.... For me this didnt work but give it a try and let me know....

Greetings Quick
THis is XP... not Vista




Greetings,

Thank you for contacting Electronic Arts.

I'm sorry that you’re having difficulties with the game.

Then try cleaning out your Temporary directory. Do not delete the folder
itself, open the folder, select all of the contents, and then delete them.

1. Double click on "My Computer"
2. Double click on the C: drive
3. Double click on the "Windows" folder.
4. Double click on the "Temp" folder.
5. Hold the "CTRL" key and tap the "A" key to select all.
6. Tap the "Delete" key on your keyboard and accept the "Are you sure you
want to delete these files" prompt.

You may get an error that some of these files can't be deleted. This is
usually because they are currently in use, so let's end any program that
would be using these temporary files.

1. Hold down the Ctrl, Alt, and Delete keys at the same time
2. Click the "Processes" tab.
3. Click on the gray bar in the middle column that says User Name to sort by
user name.
4. Do NOT select anything for SYSTEM, LOCAL SERVICE, or NETWORK SERVICE.
5. Click on anything besides EXPLORER and TASKMGR for this User Name or
other user names.
6. Click on END PROCESS
7. Repeat these steps until only explorer.exe and taskmgr.exe are open for
this user profile.

Note that some applications may take multiple times before closing. Don't
worry that you are permanently changing your system configuration; these
applications will return when you restart your system.

Thank you for posting that. I am very upset that the game is crashing like it is. Mine started to crash yesterday, and this PC is new (bought it just for SPORE!) .... It was just in leaving my home world, but now it crashed trying to click on the manage city on a different planet I have. urrrrrrrrrrrr

Mine WAS crashing before and after the patch. What got it to work was switching to the +/- keys (or whatever's designated on the keyboard) for the zooming instead of exclusively the scroll wheel and starting the game in windowed mode.

I go to windowed mode to edit various changes in my spreadsheet (planets, spice production, coordinates, etc) so I don't know if switching back in forth periodically or just starting in windowed does the trick.

I tried the temp thing - does not work.

I encountered this same frustrating problem.

The symptoms were a constantly animating activity icon upon zooming out of the home world without entering the space zone. It wasn’t encountered in previous games and it only appeared near the end of the space stage.

I tinkered with various settings touching on many of the suggestions offered here unknowingly without any effect, including clearing the cache, increasing the cache size in settings etc.

The solution which worked for me was to simply blow up a city.

Sold all the buildings and decorations out of a city and then bombed it into oblivion. From that time on was able to build additional structures decorations in other cities and leave the planet without being trapped in the planet’s atmosphere. Running smoothly at max settings since without issue, my assumption was the game is storing data of the world upon the zoom out and once the task is completed it loads the space zone. Due to some buffer overflow or other error occurring it never completes the task, thus never moves onto the next step to load the space zone with the potential of unintentional results occurring. As such destroying a city or perhaps cities reduces the data size enough to prevent the loop, or CTD from occurring. So far this has been the one and only glitch I've encountered within the game.

Pretty lame that the workaround is user dependent, (City solution) even post patch

Ive given up playing and quite frankly p.o'ed at the level of support a full month later that this has still not been addressed by Maxis/E.A

Just to add my case to this long list. I can go to any planet in and out, except my homeworld. As soon as I try to go back to space, CRASH@#$%^&*(.
Have a nice day!!!

After blowing up my all the cities in my home word it is working fine. Though I just purchased another world that has similar qualities to my original homeworld (more than 3 cities with lots of decorations) and after placing a few missing buildings I zoom out and CRASH. Sure I could probably blow everything up and rebuild but this is ridicoulous. I still can't believe they haven't patched this. I even pointed the person in EA who I contacted to this thread and still nada.

Yay just hit the bug myself... Game Over

Problem seems to come and go with varied attempts to fix it. End result homeworld is now a showstopper

It's not only zooming out now, if I try to enter specifically a world controlled by one race, game also crashes. Where are the people of Maxis or EA, where are the fixes.

I've only been playing two days and the space stage is unplayable. Crashes galore on the homeworld. Even with the suggested fixes. Hell my homeworld is constantly being bombed I don't even bother with it anymore. Go ahead blow all that stuff up it just crashes me anyways. What I need is a patch and a direct download to it because there is no way in hell I am even going to install the EA download mangager. Maybe I should just return the game and go download a copy...

I'm also having Homeworld departure crash-to-desktop problems. I have only found one common ploy that seems to avoid the crash. I have some cities that are / were taken militarily, others that were converted. I don't know exactly which is which, but I assume that the grey turrets are the peaceful takeovers and the black turrets are the military takeovers.

If I place a conversion city turret (The grey ones) and then try to zoom out of my homeworld, I crash, regardless of what city I put the grey turret on. If I don't put a grey turret on anywhere, I seem to be able to get back out without a problem, even if I fully arm up black turrets. If I don't put any turrets down at all, I'm fine. If I put only black turrets, I'm fine. I put down a grey turret, ANY grey turret, I crash on my way back out to Space.

Helpful at all?

so naturally i eventually hit the wall where i have this crash as well and the only thing i hadnt done yet was play "janitor" as described in the first post now. however i tried it out just now and even made a new city hall building model to be hollowed out in the middle so i could see whats below it (4 thin walls on each side and a door which i named "cleanup model") sure enough there was an extremely large stack of decorations sitting underneath my city hall, probably taking up a lot of resources. only problem is as soon as i clicked one of them to begin trying to remove them it crashed again to the desktop :\

here's hoping the next patch involves removing the stupid computer AI to put decorations up in your city wherever the hell it feels like... not that i can patch anyway since i'm having problems with that too.

at least i know whats causing my crash now =( hopefully it'll help other people to try it out and see if it does anything for them

I haven't had the problem with decorations building up under city hall. Being a control freak I realized the game was populating decorations early on as I tried to design my homeworld exactly to my liking. Upon exiting the planet or entering the planet the engine does add decorations. Although it does seem to be a bit random with regard to placing decorations. I have to agree with other people here. There is no reason for the game to even do this. The player should determine the look of their colonies and if anything an option to auto decorate that city should be available.

It might be a decoration object cap or a building/object cap in general. I haven't bothered to test this as I am new to the game just trying to advance through space age. Finally I just let the AI attack my homeworld for a few hours, I saved, and then went to have a look. Some mild damage to turrets and a few buildings was all that was done. I took three cities and destroyed all their decorations and left a few cities with no turrets. At this point no cities have been destroyed but it has allowed for me to continue playing.

Quick fix would be to drop city cap by 1 and that might just do it but I would rather have control over decorations. I don't usually want to use all the slots anyways. Just make sure this bug is fixed properly and not quick and dirty. Also I want a public patch so I do not have to use the download manager. Your only preventing paying customers like me from getting support for an extremely complex piece of software. Lastly build the download manager into the game if you want me to use ingame support. I have no problem patching console games whatsoever but when it comes to PC games it's just not worth the hassle. I am already looking at a full reinstall to remove SecuRom when I am finished. What more do you want from paying customers? SPORE use a dongle if it's really as bad as you publishers say it is.