thanby

Figured it out through a strangled route. I was having trouble with my Lync client for work, which was crashing every time I started it, and I contacted help desk (gotta love BYOD, I get tech support for my personal computer). They had me reset the defaults on my speaker/headphone settings, which had apparently been corrupted somehow. That fixed Lync, and it turns out it fixed SC4 as well! Now when I get into the game, about 5 seconds in the music starts playing! That's what was causing the crash! Hooray for business tech support fixing my game

Yes - Same results. Doesn't seem to matter what rendering setting, resolution, windowed/full screen options are picked, the behavior is identical.

I just picked up SC4 Deluxe from Steam and have been trying to get it running on Windows 8.1 but it crashes after about 5-10 seconds every time. I've followed the guide here (and others) and even used the Sim Launcher app to try to troubleshoot but can't seem to get anywhere. During troubleshooting I noticed that it will only crash if I have it in the foreground, if it's in the background it will stay running indefinitely in windowed mode. Unfortunately I haven't yet mastered the art of playing a game that's not the focus of my input devices, so I'm at a loss for what to do. Has anyone else seen this behavior before?