I've had problems for months with the game launcher. It was slow, sometimes crashed into a black screen, and finally just froze. I tried all sorts of things that didn't work, including a full uninstall/reinstall. I finally just gave up and made a shortcut directly to the Ambitions execution file.
Last night I downloaded the donationware program CCleaner from [link removed - Pam].
After running the file cleaner and the registry cleaner, the launcher works again. In fact, it works better than it ever has. When I fired it up the first thing it did was download two game updates.
I still can't download my freebies from The Store, but what else is new?
One more thing. I also found out that if you decide to do a reinstall and you get file transfer errors, the first thing to try is to physically clean your discs. Worked for me. But I still can't figure out how the discs got dirty while stored in their cases up on the shelf.
