Why won't Spore work on my friend's laptop?

One of my friends came over to my house and asked me to install Spore on his laptop. It is a Dell Studio 15-something from about a year ago running Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit. After successful installation, the program won’t run. The autoplay window does not show and nothing else happens. Is there some sort of conflict between programs causing this and how can I fix it?

I’m busy working on a project elsewhere, so please talk in simple words.