Spore Creepy and Cute and the 0x2ec02d4c.exe error, hardware incompatibility?

The Solution:

So, after reading several articles, forums and even my BIOS manual itself, I discovered the solution to the problem, and I only did it because I also play The Sims 3. When this error started to happen and I saw that The Sims 3 has problems running on a PC with the 12th generation of Intel processors onwards I asked myself, if Spore is from the same time and from the same developers, why doesn't it show the same error? As it turns out it does, but different...

If you have a very powerful Intel processor, with many cores, as is the case with Alder Lake onwards, 12th and 13th generation Intel processors at the time of writing this solution, the game will fail when specifically installing the Creepy and Cute parts and when running the game also with it installed. I believe that people with an Intel Xeon and other powerful ones with more cores will have this same problem and I believe that the fix for the problem will be at least similar in each case.

The funny thing is that you don't need to do or worry about any of this if you just install Spore, Galactic Adventures and Bot Parts, as they all install normally and work normally on new processors too. The problem is only with Creepy and Cute, specifically the package and script "0x2ec02d4c.exe" that it runs during installation, and that once installed, every time you start the game the script from that Parts Pack runs at the game startup, and if for any reason you raise the number of CPU cores on your computer, you will get another error, the "Configuration Script Failed [2000]" error, when trying to launch the game, which makes sense because it is as if the machine has been changed and the game does not recognize the new configuration, and repairing the game by EA App will give you the same old error, "Error: a redistributable package (0x2ec02d4c.exe) was not installed successfully. Setup cannot continue (-1073741819)".

So, let’s get back to it, the fix:

1. I needed to read my BIOS documentation and discover where were the CPU configurations. You are going to need to temporarily lower your number of active cores in your CPU. Yes, your PC is too strong to even install an old game like Spore Creepy and Cute.
2. In my Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero motherboard the configuration I needed to change was inside the Advanced tab à CPU Configuration, you go a bit down and find “Active Performance Cores” and “Active Efficient Cores”, they are going to be set to the default value “ALL”, you need to change these values. In my case I changed “Active Performance Cores” to 4 and “Active Efficient Cores” to 0. I saved and rebooted to Windows.
3. Back on Windows you may now install Spore through any means you own or want to install the game (I have the DVD and EA App versions), remembering that first you should install Spore, then Creepy and Cute, and only then Galactic Adventures and finally Bot Parts if you so wish to. You are going to notice that the game now installed successfully, without the "0x2ec02d4c.exe" error.
4. Now you may reboot back to BIOS and put the “Active Performance Cores” and “Active Efficient Cores” back to its default value, in my case “ALL”, and reboot back to windows. (EDIT: It turns out you don't need the Lazyduchess patch to run the game afterwards, so you may now stop here and just start playing the game! Either way I'm leaving steps 5 and 6 here, maybe it turns out useful to someone else one day).
5. DON’T start the game just yet! Or else you gonna receive the error 2000 and have to repeat the entire installation process all over again. Now you gonna need the “Intel Alder Lake Patch By Lazyduchess” that you can find here: https://modthesims.info/d/667734/intel-alder-lake-patch.html
6. Yes this patch was made for The Sims 3 and Medieval, but it works perfectly for this case of Spore too! After downloading and unzipping the file, you will have to run the "AlderLakePatch.exe" executable inside the unzipped file and patch the Spore executable located where you installed the game on your computer, in my case it was: "\EA Games\Spore\Sporebin\SporeApp.exe" because I use EA App and I don’t have Galactic Adventures installed. If you have Galactic Adventures installed you should also patch the “SporeApp.exe” executable inside its folder as well (\EA Games\SPORE Galactic Adventures\SporebinEP1\SporeApp.exe), or else you’re going to receive the same old error and have to repeat the entire installation process all over again.
7. Now that the game executable/executables is/are patched, you may now start and play the game as usual!!

You’re welcomed! And rest assure that the problem is not with your RAID 0 SSD or your new super NVIDIA RTX 4090 or any of its G-SYNC, AA, PP, configurations as none of those have any incompatibility issues with Spore! The problem is with your new processor that has over 24 cores and 32 threads and the old C&C DLC doesn’t like that for some reason ;-;