I had same exactly the same problem the specs I had were well enough to play the game but it would not get past trying to load the new game, what i did was borrow a friends computer with a freshly installed OS of 7 and a different video card it ran fine, so I placed his video card in my machine and it would not play so I came to the conlusion that it is probably a software clash with something on my computer, so bit the bullet and freshly installed on my computer a new OS 7 and it ran fine...
