also HAD problems starting the program (notice the past-tense)

[wylie440]

Like others, I had the problem where starting the game from Steam produces a "Preparing to Launch" dialogue followed by nothing. Starting directly from the app produced nothing, except a brief flash of "universe sandbox.exe" in taskamanger's process list.

After following the recommendations in the sticky post as well any other idea from a "can't load the program" thread I could find here, the game still wouldn't work.

So, finally, it occurred to me to try my general-solution-for-games-that-hate-multicore-processors, previously used to get SimCity4 and a few other older games to run on my first dualcore and later again on my hexacore.

Made a .bat for runfirst.exe to load the game, and voila. Loaded the 1st try. It ran rather crappily though, so in a random stroke of genius, I decided to re-allow affinity to the other cores once the program was loaded. Double-Voila, runs like a dream (until i drop >4 galaxies into a simulation, but that's to be expected.)

So, for anyone still having trouble loading the game after updating/repairing/reinstalling .Net/vcredist/directx/windows:

1. Get a program that will load the game with affinity to only one processor/core. I use runfirst.exe
2. if it performs poorly after that, re-assign affinity to more cores via taskmanager.
3. Enjoy The Massive Coolness That Is Universe Sandbox

[Dan Dixon]

That this worked gives me a few ideas for new things to try in the code.

I'd be curious if anyone else with this problem can solve it by using this method.

Here's where you can download Run First:
http://www.activeplus.com/Products/RunFirst