PlayOnline Viewer Has Stopped Working.

sad thing is you pretty much have to make your own back up discs when you first get a machine so if you have to do a complete wipe and reinstall on the HD you have them. WE have a laptop at home that is pretty much useless because we didn't do this.

I do work for a pc service and have been finding that alot of newer systems are being loaded with a recovery partition on the hard drive. Just saying be careful if your going to do a full format of the hdd. May save yourself some trouble and check to see if there is one on it first.
Can try f8 at startup and see if repair my computer comes up as a first option. if it does run through the checks on there first ex: memory check, disk check etc. all else fails should allow an option to reinstall. Dont recall the name of the option off hand.

the recover from the recovery partition on a hard drive is crap, still reloads the bloatware.

still reloads the bloatware, but those are silly little default applications and such that come with the operating system. Either way guaranteed this error is not being caused by any of those applications.

Just came across this thread but firstly, since you are running the vista version of pol, it is obvious that some file somewhere that pol is a dependency of got corrupted. As to which file exactly, that is the tricky part. It could be one of the registry keys or dll. Anyway to the solution..im tired and don't want to type much.

Try doing a full uninstall ONLY of play online client. All files associated with POL at that point should be erased after performing this action. Then you need to download/use it off your ff disc a fresh copy of the play online client and re install it (restart in between uninstalling/re installing). This should re install all the major and default dll/registry values pol needs to run. In turn, the error should go away and you should be able to log in. Well its just to save you time..that 8 hour update is hell-ish. If it then gives you a different error that is still a good sign. post it back here and we can jump on that one too.