Yeah, it's pulling the same thing on me. I even disabled Vista's DEP. It might be Windows Defender messing around. Try turning off Defender and see if that helps at all. It's Vista messing with us. I've been fighting with it for days. Most of the time, it won't let me run my Duke Nukem levels, then I get lucky and a few decide to run.

I just installed Sims Castaway Stories, and the screen blacks up a few seconds before it will load. It's Vista.

This problem is pretty common on HP machines. One of the primary causes is the nasty background software they pre-install on the system when it comes from the factory, much of it can harm your systems performance and cause it to be unreliable/unstable. The program known to cause a lot of problems with games (freezing and error codes being the most common) is this 'touchsmart' program, the filename is:

clmlsvc.exe

This program is known to block/prevent access to resources games need to load media. Some games react by freezing, others display error codes and crash to the desktop.

If you can and are willing to, terminate the task and uninstall the program. Verify it is no longer running after a reboot, then test your games. Doesn't seem like HP will be doing anything about these problem, so this is basically the only option. You can contact HP and ask them to fix problems like this, but these problems have been around for a very very long time and they just keep pre-installing this kind of software on the systems they sell and don't seem to ever care to fix the problems it causes.

Is the touchsmart software necessary for touch-based control, or is it just extra background task management?

More to the point: Can the touchscreen be used for strategy games (specifically Civilization IV and Anno 1701) with the touch controls still enabled?

This would be a dealmaker/breaker for me.....

Thanks!!