launched today. Still the same picture saying running. Did the add remove program option to uninstall. Downloaded and reinstalled. Running fine now. This time I did not put the special permissions but was still able to launch the program successfully. Not sure if that was a dev change or not.
I've a theory on what may have been causing my game to hang up. I tend to close windows I am not working with that are open in the background. This included the main game application after I've launched the pirates game from within it. Then later on I would close the pirates game window. Not sure why this would mess it all up if it lets me do it that way but for now I'll try and avoid that and see what happens.