thanks, and now I have just deleted most of what I said, but thank you for fixing the problem. Why can't windows just say hey! your firewall is not letting this game in sorry, instead of code, it would make life easier x
@rowantastic It would make things easier, but I don't think Windows "knows" what the problem is in the first place. The game can't write to the user folder, or something like that, but that can happen for various permissions-related reasons. I do agree that "initialization error" is unnecessarily obtuse, almost as gratuitously difficult as the old "unknown" error from the 32-bit Mac version of Sims 3. That has eight different causes I know of, mostly unrelated to each other.
At any rate, I'm glad the fix worked for you.
