How to get this bloody game working?!!!!!!!

Can somebody help!!

I have been scrolling these forums looking for a solution to no avail. After making the reckless decision to buy FM10 and wave goodbye to my uni degree, I am now itchiing to play it!!

I am using Vista on a 3 month old laptop. I installed the game via the DVD and have ample memory/system requirements etc. During installation, the loading bar stops on "installing...data" for a number of minutes before cutting straight to the message about "Please wait whilst fm10 is configured to your system". Having uninstalled and reinstalled a number of times, I have received two different messages, one saying that installation is complete but with errors and the other one saying that installation was completed succesfully. Upon loading the game, I get up to as far as startinh a new game and then halfway through the "setting up gamebase data" loading part, the game exits and I get an error message stating "A serious error was encountered and the application will close. An error has been filed in...." then comes a Windows message saying "Football manager 2010 10.0.0f80381 has stopped working etc etc".

Now I have looked around the forums to try and find a solution and in doing so I have installed/re-installed, updated my DirectX, downloaded dotnetfx.exe, deleted any previous sports interactive folders including the cache folder. A lot of messages were talking about Steam but I did not use Steam at all? Every time I try to install it with Steam it cuts to an error message but this is likely due to my very weak internet connection at the moment. One recurring suggestion is to verify my cache or something but having attempted to do this I have not been able to find the "local files" option when I right-click on the fm icon and select properties.

In addition, I have attempted to update my drivers and java but my internet connection has meant this downloads are not yet completed and keep quitting. I will be able to complete this at a later date but considering I have paid £20 for this game, it is annoying that I have to wait at all.

Can you offer any solutions or advice at all?

Cheers

i would suggest installing via steam, then if there are further problems you can get steam to check the file integrity and it fixes the files for you. I dont know what your saying about steam but i gather you havent been able to install it via steam? You can always download the files isntead of installing from the DVD by going to the register new games to steam option or whatever its called, it will ask what your cd key is and if you put it in it will download the files. This function is not available to all games that you can play via steam but i believe FM2010 is supported. Of course i did notice that you say your internet connection is slow or weak or whatever so you may be in for a long wait like that but on a good connection you can download it in around half an hour or so.

edit: that register new game on steam is a button on the bottom of the 'my games list' called activate a product on steam