does anyone else crash to desktop with a Zlib error when trying to load any of the gold level races? does it for me every time...

So good to hear that, only glad to be of help! :-)

ill try that when i get home tonight...

ok, i got it figured out... i had done everything in your post with no luck, so i decided to look in my virtualstore (im on vista)... sure enough i had a filesystem.ini in there... got rid of it and all was good... thanks for your help...
i think it might be a good idea for GOG to alter their install image to have the bfs files pre-extracted so this doesnt happen for anyone else...

Ah, you are not running with administrator rights in your Vista I presume?
Good to hear you got it working, I already wrote GOG support last night telling them that they might want to make a new installer.

of course im not running as administrator... running an interactive login as admin is just asking for trouble. fortunately i know enough about the virtualization to know where to look, im just annoyed that i didnt think of it sooner. as soon as i saw your post yesterday i realized what the problem must be and sure enough as soon as i got home and looked, there it was.
the worst thing is, that file wouldnt even have been there had i not opened the filesystem.ini file in a text editor... it must have auto-saved when i exited, and of course since im not admin, it saved in the virtualstore instead of program files... and then when i deleted it from program files, well, it just used the virtualized one, which means it just kept crashing...
sigh a comedy of errors...

Hehe, I administer a rather large network on a daily basis, and am used to being logged in with various semi-dangerous levels of privileges. That mindset has spilled onto my private machines as well, even though I do run "suspicious" stuff sandboxed whenever necessary.

Anyway, isn't this Vista virtualization somehow flawed if it creates a "shadow" copy automatically, but forgets to delete it when the "master" copy gets destroyed?

well, im in more of the unix mindset on a day-to-day basis... the idea of logging in as root is just... a bad idea. thats what sudo is for, and UAC works reasonably well as a... err... pseudo-sudo :)
not really... the idea of the virtualization is that the stuff in the user-level virtualstore overrides the stuff at the root level... and, under NORMAL circumstances, a file in the "real" program files dir would not be summarily deleted by an admin. the problem comes up when a user with a virtualized install of a program (me) steps outside the virtualized environment and uses sudo/UAC to elevate and delete one of the "real" files, without having the good sense to also delete any corresponding virtualized files.
had the deletion occurred though "normal" channels, ie, at the hands of the (virtualized) application, the problem would not have occured. the problem isnt with vista, UAC, or the virtualization... the problem was with ME, because im the one that waved the magic root wand and started deleting files, im the one that got the virtualized stuff out of sync, and im the one that failed to fix it :)
ill grant that the whole UAC/virtualization setup in vista is not a "simple" system... but from my perspective, its a GOOD one... and its light-years ahead of the utter lunacy of making all interactive users root which all the windows OSs suffered from pre-vista.
edit: and while this does solve the technical issues with flatout, it doesnt help with the fact that i cant finish a damn one of the gold level races. those tracks are BRUTAL...

Tell me about it! I nearly shouted at the wife, threw things at the cat etc. after losing *miserably* for the umpteenth time - it sure as heck is not for the faint of heart.

The gold races require to be much more careful, because the cars are faster and there are more turns.
I've now completed it with the normal difficulty setting without much trouble (had a harder time on silver), but with the professional level it's very different; you really need to learn the tracks to get an early lead, so that you have just the keep-in-control problem (which is still a big problem) without having the AI trying to touch you to make you spin.

Same problem
Fatal error "ZLib error (-3): invalid stored block lengths"
Windows XP SP3
there is a patch for flatout ???

Look in this very thread for a workaround. Alternatively, wait a few days until the revised installer is put online by GOG. :-)

yeah ive gotten through the first two tiers of the races with all golds now... actually once you get the hang of it, it feels like the gold races are EASIER, because the AI drives them sooooo poorly... theyre like, all over the place and wrecking on every one of the tight turns... now that ive gotten a better handle on drifting through the turns and the proper speeds to take them well, i frequenly lap the AI cars :)

good deal! i was waiting to hear this before gifting it to my brother :) i didnt want to deal with explaining how to fix everything...