well get rid of your WAREZ COPY!!! we do not support this kind of illegal activity here!!!!
oh wait, it's just you mick.

what OS? if xp, can you look at the processes tab in task manager and see if it is running? what are your system specs? have you tried just restarting? un/re installing?
now you may not want to do this, but no-cd patches have worked in the past for problems such as this. AFAIK they are not illegal. just "unethical" perhaps.