I Have the EXACT same problem and i also meet minimum requirements for the game with Vista. What's going on? I've noticed that when i run it and look at all the processes running, i see "SporeApp.exe" running at about 13972K and after, my comp briefly gets laggy but nothing happens once again. Please help

?

? I want to get back to my game
some additional info:
-I played for 2 hours straight before turning off spore
-In Games my performance rating is 3.2 and spores minimum is 3
-I did nothing inbetween the time i first played it and tried to play again other than shutting down the comp