So I just got a call from a mate of mine who picked up C&C4 today, and after almost 3 hours of fucking about he still can't actually launch this game.  Due to EA's choice to rely on using the EA download manager to enforce a level of DRM he's run into a bit of a problem.

 
Apparently due to poor coding on EA's behalf he is unable to successfully complete the process involved with EADM, essentially the program relies in part on your windows user name.  The software itself is based on a Java applet using HTML and XML coding, wouldn't be an issue normally but the code monkey's at EA haven't sanitised their inputs properly.  As a result anyone with a windows user account (like my friend) that has an apostrophe in their user name cannot successfully login to the EA download server which is a requirement to run the game (the apostrophe generates a bug in the HTML code).  There is currently only 2 options around this 1. Format your PC and create a new user name that doesn't have an apostrophe or 2.  Create a secondary user account with an EADM friendly user name just so you can run C&C4.
 
Anyway pretty shoddy QA on EA's behalf, just a heads up to anyone who might use their last name in their windows account name and is I dunno... Irish (O'Malley, O'Connor, O'Neil.... you get the idea).

Shit, I didn't even realise this game was out.

Same thing happened to me. Cracked that bitch. I swear to god this is ridiculous - I BUY a PC game and then have to CRACK it to make it run because the DRM is so fucked. I'm really starting to hate the way BUYING PC games is these days.

FYI I don't think is actually up on the C&C4 forum yet, my mate only found out through a similar report of people trying to download digital copies of Bad Company 2 through EADM.  Why they haven't patched this is beyond me, I'm no web developer but It strikes me as something that would be a simple fix.

well as a general rule of thumb, never use a username for anything, never use commors/spaces/apostophys, or dots because there are a lot of things out there that still dont recognise any chars other then numbers and letters, even tho most things allow them now, but quite clearly this is still an issue with some things... but, its bloody stupid for such a small thing to completely fucking block you from installing a game, and i think there was a simular problem when creating usernames for the betas, dont remember now i stoped playing the beta's towards the end of jan / feb. It was quite clear this game had some issues 3 months ago, but the developers just seemed to ignore most of them

this seems like an ea download manager problem more than c&c4. i bought it from a store and had no problems installing it. same with my friend who got it off steam.