Well on about my 4th try, I was able to "out wait it" and it eventually did start running.  (I wonder if this effect is what people are talking about when they say "memory leaks"?)

You need to make sure that the patch is installing into the proper stardock entertainment\elemental war of magic dir on your computer.  Sometimes it has a habbit of installing in the wrong place, and it'll mess up everything from map generation to just not loading at all.

Please open your debug.err file in notepad, and link the contents into a post here via pastebin. This will give us some technical information that can help troubleshoot your problem.

The file can be found in My Documents\My Games\Elemental

Be sure to copy the debug immediately after the error occurs; if you start the game again, the debug log will be erased and recreated for the new session.

yep I'm getting this as well... Rather annoying...

When I do I've noticed that my GPU has its load at 85%... my system is as follow:

• Windows 7 64 Ultimate
• 260GTX with latest WHQL drivers overclocked with EVGA Precision to 725/1566/1166 gpu/shader/mem
• Phenom 555 overclocked at 3.7Ghz with 4 cores enabled (200Mhz FSB)
• mobo Asus M4A785D-M Pro
• 8 GB DDR2 RAM

My guess is this has to do with the gfx, has my friends on ATI don't see this issue (they have others tho , but at least they can play)

EDIT: and btw it did the same with 1.01... so basically I'm stuck with 1.00 if I wanna play as it's the only version that works for me

Same thing happens to me the dragon loads up and the game just freezes. Win 7 64 bit. ATI 5750

I wondered if it has to do with my 1.00 saves... so I started a new campaign and got complete black screen, after the video, but I could hear the ambiant sounds...

once again the debug does not tell much... http://pastebin.ca/1925720