First level of game can start building rooms and buying objects but there are zero staff to hire - have run for 6 months and none appear at all. Does anyone else have this fault (is there a way to overcome)?


(Win 7 x64)

Did you start in tutorial mode? It could be that it's set to not have any staff until you get to a certain point of the tutorial.
I have no idea if that's actually the case though, I'm also on win7 x64 and I've had no such problem. Try restarting from the beginning and see if that helps (alternatively if you didn't use the tutorial mode, try doing it that way; maybe that will work?)

thanks for the suggestions

unfortunately no luck - it's not in tutorial mode and have tried restarting etc

just seems to never produce any staff

wondered if it was a file protection problem but as you are also on win 7 x64 and it's working then probably not...

That's incredibly odd. No idea what could be causing it.
Shouldn't be an admin rights issue or anything like that as I don't get any kind of UAC prompts.

One more idea springs to mind, I have no idea whether this will work... What profile name are you using in-game? (as in, the name you type on the Theme Hospital title page) Let me know and I'll try something out.

Have you installed the game in the default location? Don't know if it will help, but you can try to install it to C:\Games for example and see if that helps, just in case UAC or anything else like that messes up. Very strange problem.

I'm on Win 7 64 too, on a laptop, and it works fine here.

This is getting odder and odder. I *was* going to set up a second profile with a working first level and send the save file to you, to see if that helped -- but can't seem to find where the game stores save files at all (apparently it isn't in the SAVE folder, as no new profile is made there even when it's empty, and moving the contents of that folder elsewhere somehow allows the game to access my saves it seems) - so that rather scuppers that plan.

It could be maybe that one of the data files is corrupt? Have you tried uninstalling/redownloading/reinstalling?