World of Goo had been crashing on me at startup with both of my PCs, one Vista and one XP.  Really perplexing problem until a few e-mail exchanges with Ron turned up the issue. I was running ThreatFire on both of those boxes, and World of Goo didn't like it. As soon as I removed ThreatFire, the game started up fine. By the way, it wasn't enough just to disable the utility...I had to uninstall it completely.

FYI ThreatFire (http://threatfire.com) is a great free anti-malware app that doesn't rely on signatures...rather it is supposedly able to detect bad code on the fly. It's gotten really great reviews around the web and I had been using it successfully for quite some time. The only other app I've experienced that had issues with it was Joost, and actually they were never able to resolve the conflict. Bottom line, though, I think I'll be removing it in favor of something else. I'm generally not the biggest fan of anit-virus apps anyway (anti-spyware, yes, but I've never liked taking up resources with a real-time anti-virus scanner). Who knows what other conflicts it may have been causing behind the scenes?

According to ThreatFire technical support this is a known issue associated with the DRM software used by World of Goo.  The following is an alternative to uninstalling ThreatFire.  Provided by ThreatFire support:

"As of yet, the only way to solve this issue is to shut down ThreatFire before
playing your game, however this will compromise the security of your
system. In order to shut down ThreatFire, you must hold ctrl and
right-click on the tray icon, selecting "exit." then, in a run command,
type "net stop threatfire" and this will shut down ThreatFire, instead of
having to uninstall."

WoG doesn't have any DRM, threatfire is giving a false positive.

Not running threatfire won't "compromise the security of your system."  Many people don't run it & don't have issues.  Customer service BS & lack of investigation on their part.

Thanks for the help, was having the same problem and this fixed it.


Too bad there is a conflict, but it only takes a few seconds to work around it.