Quote from tester2 on 12/15/10 at 10:55:26:

 
Oh hey, that works. I just changed my name myself (from Mal to EDG)! I found something in the PM Preferences box page lets me do that (which is odd, as on other boards people usually aren't allowed to change their own usernames themselves).

Welcome and enjoy.

Just a quick test to see that I can post. Anyway I got the beta version up and running, so I'll be trying out what's different about it.

Hello! My name is Seth, I live in MD and I've been studying the cosmos and it's movements for years. I've often thought of how useful a program like this would be and now I've finally stumbled upon it! I'm really appreciative of your work, thank you so much for sharing this important knowledge.

Welcome!  I'm glad it worked for you this time.  I hope you stick around.

Welcome.  I'm glad you made it.

Hi Wil.  Welcome!

Hi and welcome.
I'm out of town for a week and internet is spotty, so if I don't reply quickly, that's why.
 
Let me just cover the basics of running betas.
1.  You must first have installed Gravity Simulator 2.0 on your computer.  The setup package creates some dependency files that the beta versions will need.  So if you're downloading the beta onto a different computer than 2.0, that might be your problem.
 
2.  You must download the beta executable.  You can put it in your Gravity Simulator directory, or you can create a new directory for it. Wherever you put it, there must be a resume.gsim in that directory.  Codeoptomizer.dll is optional.
 
3.  If resume.gsim is corrupt, it will crash the program as you describe.  Just to make sure, delete resume.gsim, copy any of the existing gsim files into the same directory as your beta.exe , and rename it resume.gsim
 
4. If codeoptomizer.dll is causing your problem, you can find out by hiding the file.  Either remove it from your directory, or rename it so Gravity Simulator can't find it.  Codeoptomizer.dll duplicates some of the code in the VB version of Gravity Simulator, but codeoptomizer is written in C++, so it compiles into faster code.  If the file is missing, Gravity Simulator will execute a slower VB version of the same code.
 
5.  What country are you in?  Some people using European versions had some problems with version 2.0.  The betas seem to have fixed these problems.  The symptom was that Gravity Simulator ran just fine the first time around, but the resume.gsim created by European Windows was corrupt because it uses commas instead of decimal points.
 
Let me know if any of this helps!