Ocram’s Blog

Do you get the error message “This application failed to initalize properly (0xc0150002)” when starting Football Manager 2009 on Windows XP? Chances are that it’s trying to tell you that the .NET Framework 2.0 is not installed. I don’t know whether this an isolated issue or whether it affects all XP installs without the framework, but it’s a problem I’ve come across half a dozen times already.

To resolve it, you can either download the framework here, or run the installation from the program directory (from memory) “C:/Program Files/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2009/directx/dotnetfx.exe”, substituting the drive letter if necessary.

On a side note, why is it that activation is such a pain on this game? The serial number, instead of being printed in a normal font, is one where you can hardly establish the difference between various characters, and is in dots rather than solid lines.

Then the phone activation, you have to enter 25 (?) characters five times, and then a 7 (?) digit response key a total of 8 times. And I thought Windows activation was a pain.