Has anyone else experienced this? I'm currently on Windows 8.1 and have been trying to find a solution to no avail. As soon as the intro video ends, the game freezes and i have to bring up the task manager to end it. The task manager tells me that the application is 'not responding'. Any help would be appreciated.

Try and disconnect from the internet and turn off your antivirus program and see if it will run.

Sadly, this does not work. The weird thing is that i was able to play the game just fine with my Double Deluxe digital version. I even installed a few expansions that i had on CD over it and everything worked.

You may try and turn off user control until you get it running and then turn it on again and see what happens.

I set it to administrator before I played the first time and turned shadows down to medium. Played fine. It did crash on exit. Haven't had the time to look for a solution to that. I may change compatibility to win xp to see if that fixes it. My old copy was working fine on those settings.

I spent three hours and a system restore trying to fix that earlier. The problem was that I didn't wait long enough for it to load.

How long of a wait are we talking about here?

Edit: Problem Fixed! It was just a case of not waiting long enough for things to load. Thanks Portaller!

This happens to me as well :/

Happens to me every time i start the game (because of my huge CC amount), i just Ctrl + Alt + Del to bring up the task manager and right click on sims 2 -> Bring to Front. After some time the game will respond and off you go playing