TheJadedMieu: When I click on the icon to start the game, nothing happens. GOTHIC.EXE appears in the Task Manager, but is stalled. After trying most of the solutions in this forum, I got it started when it was the first thing I opened after rebooting my computer, but it's annoying to have to restart every time I play.

Anybody have any idea of a more permanent fix?

Arkose: It sounds like some startup process might be interfering with it, most likely your antivirus. Try adding the Gothic and gogwrap exes to your antivirus's whitelist (which might be called "trusted files", "exclusions", "ignore list", etc.--the end result is the same). Gogwrap is in the main folder where you installed the game while Gothic itself is in a "system" subfolder there.

If you're not sure how to do this let me know what your antivirus is and I'll provide more detailed instructions.

fragonard: There were two threads in this forum about that exact problem. I don't know why the admins deleated them, as other people could have benifited from them. Anyhow I had your exact problem. One of the processes running under Task Manager was causing my game not to load. It was some sort of HP Support program that was my problem. I would suggest going into task manager and closing as many programs as you can without crashing your computer. The problem I had was that the process I had to close was one of the many svchost files.
You can download a program called Process Explorer from this site....
http://www.download.com/Process-Explorer/3000-2094_4-10223605.html

This will let you see the names of all the proceses running and you can try killing them one at a time then quickly try to load Gothic. These processes usually start running again in a few seconds but its long enough to get the game loading. If this is going in the right direction and it is one of the processes running than I can let you know how to disable the process and you shouldn't have any prpblems after that.