However the game has been out for several months and is still poorly supported, buggy, problematic and unlikely to have all of its issues ever properly addressed - as the original Star Wars Battlefront never did either. I strongly recommend against buying this game - you have been warned.

Dual-Core Crash Fix

A lot of Star Wars Battlefront 2 users which dual-core CPUs such as the AMD X2 or Pentium D series, as well as users with Pentium 4 HyperThreading CPUs (i.e. "virtual" dual cores) are having problems with this game. The reason appears to be because the game suddenly places 100% load on both cores and locks the system, or crashes to desktop with no error message. This can occur at any time during the game. The solution involves using one of two methods:

Setting Processor Affiinity Manually: Launch Star Wars Battlefront 2, and as soon as the game appears to begin loading, or after it has loaded up, press CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the Task Manager. Under the Processes tab, find the BattlefrontII.exe process, right-click on it, select 'Set Affinity' and in the box which appears, untick 'CPU 1'.

Setting Processor Affinity Automatically: If you want to force the game to only use one of your CPUs automatically each and every time you run the game, see the instructions here for using the Imagecfg utility, a small Windows NT file you can safely copy into your \Windows\System32 directory and then use to permanently set the affinity for particular programs. I recommend you backup your BattlefrontII.exe file before applying this tweak, as the only way to undo it is to restore the original .exe file. Furthermore, note that you may have to redo this tweak each time you patch the game, since the executable will change.

Both these methods basically force the system to effectively see, and use, only one of the CPU cores on your dual core CPU to run the game, thereby temporarily resolving the problem. There is no performance loss since as far as I know, Star Wars Battlefront 2 is not optimized for dual core CPUs.

If you don't have a dual-core CPU or are not using a Pentium 4 with HyperThreading, then you may well be experiencing issues with the game's secuROM copy protection system. This system is known to cause a variety of problems, such as errors when launching the game, and crashes during gameplay. Keep an eye on the Official SWBF2 Forums for announcements regarding any fixes or patches.

Non Dual-Core Crash Fix
Some people are suggesting that by disabling sound you can get the game to work. Note that if you can't get into the game menu to turn the 'Mixer Config' option to Disabled under Audio options, then use the /nosound command line method (See my first SWB Tweak Guide page 7).