My copy of spore is broken :(

I'm in so much agony... the first sign something was wrong was that the tails of every creature I looked at kept jittering in a very, uh, epileptic-unsafe way, interrupting their lovely smooth animations. Then whenever I try to paint my creatures or test drive them in the creature creator, the game crashes...

I'm scared to actually play a run of the game if it's doing this.

Noooo I wanna make creaturessssss