Page 1 of sims 2 crashing/blank screen help*

got this for the kids and loaded once and when tried again the EA announcement came on with a blank screen which I can`t get out of without rebooting. Downloaded the latest patch but no joy. Running with an X550 card with 256 RAM and a 3000 processor (HP media centre pc).

Tried on another lower spec pc with 5500 card, same problem.

Funny because SIMS 1 also won`t play on both the pc`s but will run on a notebook with 32 Mb card.

Also how do you uninstall them from the pcs as the unistall programme won`t do it?

thanks