Hi everyone!
I've stumbled upon this place by a mere accident while searching on how to repair VTMB to function on my laptop. I have the exact same problem as
Tschinsking who previously posted the crash report. The game would start and when I press New Game, the game crashes. I also have Windows 8.1 64bit, but the funniest thing is that I had been playing the game on my laptop with said OS until August 2015. Then I stopped playing it, cause I moved to another game and completely forgot about VTMB. And today, for who knows what reason, I decided to play it. Turns out, I cannot. At first it gives me error ""Access denied - Please login with administrator privileges and try again" which is ridiculous as I'm logged as admin. In properties, I make sure it says allow administrative privileges, then the game won't start at all. Upon discovering this patch, I've reinstalled the game at least 3 times, hoping it would work. Installing this patch gave me hope as it starts the game nicely, and the moment I choose "new game" it crashes. I've placed Final Nights mod, and the same thing happens. In vanilla version and with mod. The moment I choose new game, it will crash.
Even if I choose to load old save file, it crashes. So I'm truly confused. According to google search, some people claim that this problem is because of some windows update that MS pushed awhile back. I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm willing to take it under a consideration, as MS can screw up things for us customers.
The problem is pinpointing the culprit in updates, cause I haven't played the game since August 2015 and since that time, I had lots of windows updates installed. Not sure what to think or what to do. :c