Game won't start

[EnCamp 21]

This is an odd error. I try to activate SC4 from the desktop, and it claims to have no CD in the drive, although it is there.

[EnCamp 21]

And it gets better! I put in the second disk, and the game magically activates. Whenever I try to load a terrain portion, the game crashes. Anyone care to explain what the hell is going on here?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

OK, first of all, disk2 is the play disk.  That's the one being sought.  And I would turn off autoplay on your CD drive.

Now we are not clairvoyant,so we need to know details of your running environment.  Sc4 is a big RAM user and eats processors for appetizers.  It also demands that you have a working sound system and DirectX 9.0c under Windows XP SP2.  So please answer these questions:

What is your:

1. CPU type, speed, number of cores
2. Graphics card and drivers
3. Sound card and drivers
4. RAM size
5. Virtual Memory settings (iinitial, maximum)
6. Operating System and update level
7. Version of the game (SC4, RH, Deluxe) and update level

Do you get a crash to the desktop or a system crash?

Oh, and please use the edit button to add to an immediately preceding post.

[EnCamp 21]

Well, I actually think the problem lay in the plugins. I had a whole bunch of uploads in my plugin folder, and after throwing out a couple of them, It began to work fine.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Plugins should not exceed 2GB - (game size + city size).  I have seen the game running at about 400MB, so I would say that approximate max for plugins is in the area of 1.6GB.