More Awesome Than You!

So a while ago Vista (ugh) installed Service Pack 1 on my laptop, and afterwards I was unable to get my game to load...  It would constantly crash at the load screen during the scrolling text with the classic "the application will now terminate" error.  Removing my Downloads folder didn't fix the problem, and neither did updating my drivers, etc.  Anyway, I ended up using system restore to return to the day before, and voila, my game loaded up fine.  Anyway, Vista has been harassing me to install Service Pack 1 again, and so I finally gave in today, and sure enough my game won't load again.  So it's definitely the Service Pack 1 update...  but I can't seem to figure out why this is causing the crash, as I can't seem to find anything about Freetime + SP1 incompatibility...  One person over at MTS2 had the same problem, but a ton of other people seem to have no problems running the game with SP1.  So does anyone have any idea why this is causing my game to crash?  Ideally I'd like to keep Service Pack 1, as it's supposed to actually make Vista somewhat more operational.  I'm running FreeTime (no patches) + a NOCD crack.  All Eps and Sps (except Ikea) installed.

Oh, man, I just installed today, and now me too. And here I was thinking it was tight pants.

Vista Victims.  :(

I'm a lucky duck who hasn't had this problem.  I believe the computer came with Vista + SP1, I wonder if this makes a difference? *scratches head*

What I mean by that is I installed the game after SP1 was installed.  I have no idea if this would affect it but perhaps a good old fashioned uninstall/reinstall is called for?

Because of a service pack?!? It just seems so wrong.

I haven't had a problem with the Vista sp1 but I think it was because I never use windows automatic updates. I am picky about what gets updated on this computer. I downloaded and installed manually.

Actually, I've been getting this occasionally (not often) since installing SP1, too. I just thought my computer was overheating (laptop + insanely hot apartment... not even an external fan can cool it enough sometimes).

Maybe a driver issue, related to SP1?

I tried a few random things to try to see if they would help...  I tried installing the first free time patch, which didn't work...  then I uninstalled and reinstalled freetime, but that didn't work...  And I tried updating my video drivers, but that made no difference either...  All of my other drivers/BIOS/etc seem to be up to date, so I dunno what the problem is.  With SP1 installed I can't even get to the neighborhood selection screen, everytime I try to load the game it crashes at the scrolling text.
 
Stoopid Vista.

So anyway, I kinda gave up and used system restore to restore to before the SP1 update.  Gah.  But now my game works, and that's what's most important, right?