Can't start the Demo...

I may be wrong about this, but I think several people with dual core processors have had the same issue.

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Interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum Europae vincendarum
Sometimes I get this urge to conquer large parts of Europe.

I hope so, a dual core and 2 high end geforce SLI cards is on my upgrade list right next to vista and 2 extra gigs of ram.
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Interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum Europae vincendarum
Sometimes I get this urge to conquer large parts of Europe.

You can take care of the issue right now, actually.

Start SEV. Press CTRL-ALT-DELETE, go to the Processes tab, find se5.exe, right click on it and select Set Affinity. Uncheck one of the CPUs.

Once that is done SE5 should play normally, but you'll have to repeat the trick each time you start SE5 unless you get Prio, a utility that manages stuff like that. Hopefully Aaron tracks down the bug soon, but in the meantime this workaround reduced the amount of crashes I have by about 90%.

Well I don't know why the game would have trouble with duel processors but as for optimizing the code for duel processors that probably won't be possible. I took a bit of coding back in college and from what i remember you have to specificly thread your code of duel processoring. If you don't the program can't take advantage of the duel processing and your stuck at the programining running like you only have 1 processor. It would probably take a major rework of the code to make SEV take advantage of duel proccessors. Unless the problem is arising from the coding tring to use the duel processors but doing it incorrectly.

Unfortunatly duel proccessing is mainly a gimic by CPU companies to get more total speed by using 2 cheaper chips IMO, because MOST people don't know anything about PCs as is apparent by the big tech support industry. Programs are either written to use duel processing or they are not. And MOST are NOT because it takes a lot more work to thread for multiply processors. The only real advantage is multitasking as you can run 2 programs each on their own processor so it's more effecient and is faster which is handled by the OS. But anyhow you get the idea and I'm getting side tracked.

Which files in particular is it complaining about? Its very odd that it would pop that sort of error up after you've play it.

If its complaining about Design files, start a new game and remember to pick a Minister in the Empire creation screen- if you don't do that the game will throw all sorts of error messages at you.