Crashes when loading

Hi,

I recently got back in to playing Spore. The install has been sitting on my pc for a while, so this is not a fresh installation. 

Strangely, roughly every 40 minutes, the game now crashes when loading (I.E. when leaving a planet), gving "ACCESS_VIOLATION writing address 0xbf7fbe28
address: 0x5591eafc "C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\d3d9.dll":0x0001:0x0005dafc" as the exception type. I've never had this before. The file is attached. 

I'm playing in the space age, on a save (also the only save) I had when opening up the game again.

Any idea as to what is causing this?