I do know, however, that the Registry was drastically changed by Microsoft in Vista and 7, especially in 64 bit versions, and that it is somewhat different in those 2 OSes than in earlier versions of Windows. it appears that, at the moment, i've been locked out of my registry and neither regedit.exe or regedt32.exe will allow me to access it this time around. Thanks for the info, i'll check into the reg entry you gave me. so thats why i'd rather use a registry hack, or as a last resort, a no disc crack. but this is extremely agravating because alot of my other apps also look for my physical device and assume its e drive, then when they look they find that it has become a different letter and give an error. i then tell my virtual drive software to take over e and use it as a virtual drive. i actually have to change the drive letter of my physical drive to another letter that isnt already being used by my other devices or any of the already existing virtual drives. for my system e drive is the default drive for my physical device. however i did find a temporary solution for the problem. theres something called wear and tear you know? and anyway, if i carried around discs for all my games (i'm very mobile and like to game while on the go) then i would have to carry enough to fill an entire backpack for all my games. The reason i dont just use the originals are because no matter how careful i am with discs, they always get scratched up to the point of not being usable over a course of time. and i'm thinking that if this works for SimCity then it will also work for other games as well since most of them also request a disc to be in the drive to be played. i have different versions of Grand Theft Auto, Sid Meier's Civilization IV, Age Of Empires, etc. I'm also assuming that this Registry trick will work for other games as well. One more thing: do i need to change the drive letter in the "Installed From" entry as well? and, if so, does it have to be the same letter that i assign in the "CD Drive" entry?
but if you (adroman) or anyone else here knows how to quickly resolve this then by all means tell me. but i'm afraid resolving that is out of the bounds of this community. i am the administrator and this is the only active account on this machine. But i'm not on a corporate/educational/etc. I have yet another problem: Windows 7 wont let me edit (or even view) the Registry!!! when i type in regedit.exe under the Run command in Start Menu, it gives a message saying that registry editing is not allowed on my system.