Hellew,

I have re-installed GTA IV on my new gaming rig that becane operational last month. The excitement of 100 fps GTA IV was short lived tough as the game does not launch. I have a CD version, installed it, installed all the bloatware that comes with it to make it work, still nothing, the game is stuck saying that it can't launch because error WS10.

Is there anything I can so EXCEPT what I have already read on others forums about updating drivers and clean installs. It is a fresh, untouched, unplayable installl out of the box, my pc can run it more than perfectly and every single driver is up to date.

Like the links says you may want to see if your if gta4 is running on the right framework and windows package.
https://support.rockstargames.com/hc/en-us/articles/200145026-WS10-Error-in-GTA-IV

Download xliveless and put it in your GTA IV folder. Google it up xliveless for GTA IV. GFWLive always fuck my GTA IV up, uninstall it since you won't need it after using xliveless. But just a note, you won't be able to play multiplayer without GFWL.

Thanks. I dont care about multiplayer. Tbh, it is empty as most GTA IV copies are modded anyway.

Tested, it works but doesn't. Now my settings are locked to the minimum and the game does not let me change anything.
I think i'm gonna uninstall the game, broken product on purpose by shitty DRM softwares that prevents even a disk copy to run at all. That's insulting. I hope GTA V wont be stuck with all this crap...

Do you have a "commandline.txt" file in your game directory? if so; delete it, that file forces the game to do specific things which one of them are to lock the game's graphics settings.