So after five days of GTA IV not working on my Vista 64-bit system (and me not wanting to play the game on my older XP system) I finally decided to just install a copy of XP on my Vista machine . . . for the sole purpose of playing GTA IV. Now granted GTA IV is a pretty awesome game and it was probably worth it for me to spend a couple of hours or so installing XP, software and drivers (that added to the several more hours spent moving files around, formatting hard drives, etc). But it is pretty sad that I was basically forced to install a separate operating system on my computer just to play a single game. Oh well, at least the game is playable now (I already have 145 points) and actually is running pretty well so all in all I'm happier then I was a couple of days ago.

So finally after endless hours of frustration and obsession, I finally got the result I wanted, and imagine, all it took was to reformat a hard disc and install a separate operating system. If only other problems in life were so easily resolved . . .

it hard to get XP back, I've tried 4 ways with no luck

The funniest part is that I can actually run the game in Vista now (running from the version I installed in XP) so it would seem that the issue with the game not starting has something to do with how it installs in Vista compared to XP. :P