i don't know if any of you are still having problems, but a friend of mine simply could not get his game to run until today.

we had tried everything, every possible fix people posted, even some other stuff off the top of our heads, we were desparate...

then today he turned down the hardware acceleration in his sound control panel, and VOILA! he's up and running. i believe the issue is sblive! related. his specs are as follows

thunderbird 900
asus a7v mobo
asus v7700 geforce2 deluxe
sblive!

dunno if this fix has been posted, i looked at a bunch of pages and didn't see it, i check these boards almost every day for them so in case i am repeating, my apologies.

recap: control panel -> sound. turn down hardware accel.