My younger son recently downloaded a trial for Spore Creature Creator, a precursor to the Spore game coming in September. He was unable to get the program to run more than once or twice; every other time it would crash to the desktop when executed. I tried basic troubleshooting like closing running apps, shutting down AV, and updating video drivers but to no avail. I even purchased the full product on disc from Wal-Mart and tried it. Not even a reinstall could get it working. So it was time to do a little Googling.
I didn’t think a teaser for a game coming out would have any problems written about it, but apparently the problem I was dealing with was occurring to many people making it a significant issue. Luckily there were references to the EA downloader app (my son must have been prompted to install this when he downloaded the trial). Apparently EA’s downloader conflicts somehow with the Spore app. After uninstalling EA downloader (not just closing, which I had tried) we were good to go.