I've been able to download the game using my browser, and installed it with no difficulty. Now as soon as I hit "Play" on start-up the game crashes? Anyone else having this problem?

If you mean the launcher runs ok but when you choose Play it just hangs on a black screen then yes I'm having that too.

I end up using Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the Task Manager & that tells me Tales of the Sword Coast is not responding.

I'm running Win 7 (64bit) with an ATI Radeon HD5800 (driver version 8.762.0.0).

Have you both chosen the ' run as administrator' option in the shortcut - often necessary for running older games.

Also setting the game compatibility to Windows XP (SP3) can be useful.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/11841-run-administrator.html

Here are a few things to try:

Don't install to Program Files folders.
Try running as administrator.
Try running with different compatibility settings.
Try running the game windowed (you may need to change your desktop colour setting to 16-bit).

So I've installed the game to my documents folder, I'm running it as an administrator, I've tried every Windows XP compatibility setting and I'm running it windowed with 16-bit colour settings on my desktop. The game still crashes as soon as the opening cinematic ends.

What's annoying is that this is the second time I've installed this game, and I don't remember having this problem at all the first time.

Alright, thanks, I'll try that. And sorry for reviving old threads, I assumed that it was preferable to making new threads about old problems.