The Problem

I bought Hearts of Iron 3 a while ago, but i've just got round to playing it, being sensible i thought it best to check for and download the latest patch for the game, to make sure i get the best playability experience. So i downloaded and installed HoI3 v1.2 patch.

I played the game for a while then saved my progress, and so on. Well the next time i came to play the game i could not get it to actually start a game, it would load as far as the menu but crash whenever i tried to load my saved game, and it also crashed whenever i tried to start a new game.

I did what every self respecting gamer does and trawled through the web to see if anyone else had the problem, well it seems there are loads of people with different problems, and possible fixes include cutting sections of text of out the save game files and so on, but nothing worked for me on my problem.

The Solution

Eventually I stumbled on the resolution completely by fluke, i double clicked on the hoi3game.exe (actual game file) to launch the game instead of using the desktop shortcut which launches the hoi3.exe (launcher), and it loaded, so i started a new game, saved it and closed down and tested it again with both the launcher and the game, and i can confirm it is definately a problem with the launcher. Create a shortcut to the hoi3game.exe file and use that.