[Dan Theman]

Sorry guys, I've been travelling a bit and haven't had the opportunity to respond:

KGrob: it sounds like you need to go through the "unlicense" trick to get it to show up. Also, in many cases you're right about multi-processors. Thankfully they're compatible with OOTPX.

niremetal: yes, I would suggest running the patches as an admin. However, you shouldn't need to make any more exceptions for those - the exception stays put, so as long as OOTP doesn't change the name or location of its .exe file (which it won't, you'd have to do that manually), you should be fine. If you do decide to relocate OOTP to another location or hard drive, you'll want to set up the exceptions again.

rincewindw: I hate to say it, but that sounds like bad news for your save. I would run an integrity check on your drive, and check off the scan for bad sectors/automatically attempt to recover button when you do that. I'll be up front and say the chances are that won't help, but it's worth a shot (it will also require a restart and take a good, long while so do it while a game is on TV or something like that).

That unfortunately highlights another issue that's independent of Vista: the need to back up leagues for this game - any memory or hard drive issues that you have can cause a league to become corrupted, and those can be caused from anything involving physical hardware errors to power supply irregularities (in other words, they're bound to happen to many of us from time to time). My take is that this is a little different from most other games, where the saved games have MUCH smaller digital footprints and are therefore far less likely to encounter those types of errors. While crash recovery can be built into games, there's sadly nothing that can really be done to prevent write errors from within OOTP to the best of my knowledge.