My GF and I played a bunch last night and everything seemed fine until we actually started playing the Creature phase. Now every few minutes it will crash to desktop. I've tried reinstalling and uninstalling my video drivers, i've tried lower graphic settings.

I have WinXP, 2.0 Ghz Pentium 4, 3.5 gigs of Ram, ATI Radeon X1650.

Whats going on? Anyone relate?

OOoh boy. Had the same problem. Installing the Omega drivers helped a bunch ( Also boosted performance by around 5 fps)

Is the X1650 an AGP card? If so, thats probly why. I do suggest you go here: http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati.php and get their driver.

it is an AGP! Don't tell me this is why!

It's really been annoying to run around for about 5-10 minutes and then have the game crash to desktop. I noticed that flying or sprinting really affected it. I will give these drivers a shot and report back on what happens.

It might be why. Very likely its not per se because its AGP but rather because of the drivers. The card in question is ported over from the PCIe version, so the drivers used are basically the same. Therefore, it glitches sometimes. The Omega drivers have a few tweaks to help with that.

Haven't personally had any crashes of the game, but there has been alot of complaining about spore crashing, mainly in the creature stage. It will probably fixed in the next few weeks.

I had Spore continually crash if I didn't add eyes to my creature. I would have loved to see how the world looks without them. Interestingly enough, when I started with a different creature, those eyeless ones were there.

I had creature phase crash once, but I suspect it was something else as I noticed later that trend was doing a scan and I was trying to open outlook in the background too. :p

If they don't have eyes everything is black around him except the i mmediate vicinity, at least in cell phase.

I tried the omega drivers and that didn't work. I made Spore's process have the highest priority but this only delayed the inevitable crash.

I can't use any of the outfitters during gameplay, the game soars to using 99% of my CPU and freezes with the menu half changed. Strangely enough the creators are fine and the outfitters work from the create menu.