Vista can be like a very strict baby sitter sometimes..it protects your files to keep from bad files (malware) doing bad things to your system and playing with your files.

You do need to have certain rights over the Program Files folder to make any changes to it in the first place so this would be telling your baby sitter to back off because you know what you're doing..

to test if Vista just doesn't want you playing with your Program Files folder, you can try moving/installing the Virtual Families folder to another area of your computer and try seeing if it'll run properly from there. If this is the case, you can consider moving your game onto a blank CD

Okay, now I'm having this problem. I've tried the things described in this thread - reinstalling, DEP settings, compatibility - and nothing seems to be working. It gets past the LDW logo scene and to the loading screen and then it stops.

--Oh yes, and I'm running an evaluation copy of Windows 7. It doesn't seem, thus far, to be all that different than Vista...

Have you tried temporarily moving your savegame files (or renaming the savegame folder) to see if one of the files has become corrupted? A corrupted savegame file can cause loading problems.

Normally I'm pretty computer savvy, but it seems this has gone over my head. Heh. What exactly am I trying to do?

Krystal,

This FAQ answer should help.

I backed up the files, renamed the folder with the saved games and it still crashed... but then I reinstalled the game, put in all the mods I wanted in one big file copying session and now it seems to be working!!

(P.S. I think the problem also had something to do with the fact I hadn't noticed the name of one of the mods was slightly off from what the game recognized So I guess it's all on me!)

Yay!

Glad you got it working! I'd guess you're right and it was because the game was trying to load an important image and crashed when it couldn't find it.