Hi
With perseverance usually comes success and I commend you.
Most of the latest problems with the patch have been resolved with the temporary disabling of your anti virus product esp AVG Free, excluding various directory's may not be enough in this instance.
Vista and Win 7 permissions (with its various versions) can be a issue with many programs, when this occurs we have found that changing the game install directory to the users path or generally outside the OS Program Files path has also proved successful.
I am glad you are enjoying the game, we also think its a bit special
