I just got my email notification to download World of Goo for the PC.  I downloaded the .exe and installed it.

Here's the problem, when I try to run World of Goo, the screen goes black as if the game is loading and a cursor appears in the middle of my screen.  If I don't move my mouse, it just stays frozen on the black screen and nothing loads.  If I move the mouse, the screen reverts to my desktop and there is no World of Goo application running at all.  Not in the background... nothing.

What's going on?

do you have any anti-malware or firewall software running?  we've seen similar problems with look'n'stop and threatfire.  threatfire actually needed to be uninstalled (not just disabled) for world of goo to run.  also, do you have another computer you can try the game on?  and last but not least, did you buy the game on our website or somewhere else?

Must be threatfire... dammit!!!

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."