hmm . .the only thing i can help you on this is to reinstall it. apparently it didn't install the main "core" of the files in the core of the computer. the patch patches the game including core files and if no core files are found, it can not patch the stuff. you need to reinstall the game, thats the best i can say.

Having same problem trying to reinstall.

The problem here is that one of the registry entries it's trying to access is wrong. For me, it was the PATH entry. A reinstall would probably work, I didn't want to go that far so I sought another solution. This is what worked for me:

Go to Start->Run and type in "regedit". From there, find the folder that it lists when the patch fails. (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Stardock\Drengin.net\sins)

If that folder really is blank, then you'd need to reinstall or find someone who can list the entries for you to type in yourself.

If the problem is like mine, the entry PATH will not be the directory that your game executable is actually in. Double click it, change the path to where your game is. I think it saves automatically, but doublecheck. It was fixed for me at this point. Good luck