I have now had time to search through this forum for other peoples experiences of this exact error, and it appears to have been going on for while now as loads of people have experienced this - and not a variation of this problem, the EXACT same thing.
It would appear the easy solution is to reboot windows. I havent tried this yet as im at work at the moment, however my fears are that because of my attempts to reinstall the game, and when finaly it did re load, i had to ignore some of the files, it still wont work.
There must be a route problem causing this error, as it is happening on so many machines. Are attempts being made to try and fix it?
I have logged onto the game while at work, and it is fine from this PC (at the moment anyway). Fingers crossed for when i get home eh!
Andy.
PS. GREAT GAME bye the way!