Re: Game won't launch on multiple machines - Activation UI.exe issue?

Ok, I got the game to launch after looking into the link crinrict provided, but its not the best news either.

To put it simply: There was a problem with my windows user profile that caused a specific .dll file to misbehave. The file in question is KERNELBASE.dll (as can be seen in the performance monitor paste above). I tried a number of fixes suggested in that set of posts, but none of them worked. They did, however, educate me on the issue a little bit and I found a way to get it fixed. 

In that thread, it was believed that KERNELBASE.dll's problem arose from a corrupted user profile (and subsequent damaged DLL). In my case, several new profiles being made on my machine (and re-testing with Sims4) was not enough to get it running. I guessed since any profile i created on the machine would still point to the fragged DLL file, so it made little difference at that point.

I succumbed to completely restoring windows 8 to factory defaults on my machine (a surface pro gen 1) and after reinstalling the game, it launched just fine. 

I wish I had a better solution to offer anyone having the Activation UI.exe/KERNELBASE.dll problem. I had to take the nuclear option, unfortunately. Thankfully, the game works now, and in my case a system reset was not very serious and easy to get the Surface Pro back up to where I had it before.

My other pc which had the same issue may never play the game, as I can't afford to wipe it and start fresh (at the moment, anyway).

I hope this helps someone if they have the same issue. Sorry I don't have a better solution for you.

Thanks to Crinrict for the technical help!