Let me first start off that I do NOT play spore, but my wife can't get enough of the game. Ok so last week I started having random Explorer.exe crashes. I kept searching for the root of the problem but couldn't find anything concrete of what was going on. This morning I get on and everytime I right clicked, explorer.exe crashes like a SoB! So, now im like wtf MS windows you blow! Well i finally after about 2 hours of searching called MS support, wait the 500 hours to talk to a guy in India. Well After another 500 hours we pinpoint the problem. Apparently SecuROM uses a Shell Extension that is faulty. As soon as i disabled the SecuROM shell extension, BAM everything works perfect. I played around with it again and it works like a charm! Now if I am a legitimate user and have to go though these kind of hoops to get a game from f***ing my system up then screw EA. I mean seriously is there any QA at EA or SecuROM? Apparently MS knows about the issue and has informed SecuROM of the error. So i guess that means that it will get fixed in the next game that has SecuROM. Or knowing EA it will get overlooked and another screwed game will be released before it should have.
Disabled the CmdLineContextMenu Class - SecuROM context menu for Explorer - Version 1,1,224,0 I used Shexview to disable it. http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html
Same thing happened with the 1.1 patch of Mass Effect, they released a 1.1a to fix it, there were some work arounds on the ME forums too utter pain in the backside.
talk about a rootkit. this is why i am not going to buy an EA game if they continue to put such things in their games.
I just had this problem yesterday You can actually find the fix on this very forum. AnthraxPants posted the fix in this thread which has cured my problem completely.(Thanks mate) http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=2835601
