I have been having this very same problem, but I can see we are not going to get any support here on this. Love the game but would appear the correct course of action here is forceing a Refund. They need to give us our stand alone verson of Simcity. Getting in Bed with EA WAs a HUge mistake on Maxis's part.
If you want to play the game and you are playing single player you could try the stay off line hack that is out there. Just do a Google search and you will find it. I am using it and it works. You still have to have a network connection but it saves a local copy and updates the servers when you connect. I have had it save 1 city so far.
It proves the game will run offline as well.
