SimCity 4 Deluxe stopped working in Windows 7

I had SimCity 4 Deluxe installed and running on Windows 7 64-bit without any major issues for a few months. As far as I can remember, I do not think I even had to adjust compatibility mode, or tweak the command line launch options. Few days ago it worked fine, but yesterday I had tried to launch it, but it failed to start.

SimCity4.exe process appears in Task Manager, but only takes up 1.7-2.3 Mb of RAM and nothing happens (no error messages, no activity whatsoever). I checked Windows Event Log, as per suggestion in comments, it does not throw any errors. I suppose system does not deem it as an error since the process continues to run, and does not crash.

I had not install any new software recently, and latest Windows update was installed two and a half weeks ago, i.e. it could not contribute to the issue conceivably. The only thing I did differently game-wise is save on exit (before I would customarily save the game, or save and exit to region, and only then actually exit), but that would not break the installation, would it now?

Before I try reinstalling it, I would like to comprehend the mystery of what had transpired. Is that game files corruption issue? Is that some sort of system glitch? I would appreciate any input in answers or comments to help diagnose the problem.

Solution 1:

Answer in Progress

Issue is caused by Kaspersky Internet Security, which for some reason assigned High Restricted (based on heuristics) application control setting, and subsequently denied it for “code intrusion”. Manually assigning Trusted rating solves the problem.