Found this on the Game forums:
Make sure you have hardware acceleration turned on.
(Go to Properties from the desktop, then click Settings, Advanced, Troubleshoot, and slide the Hardware Acceleration bar all the way up to full.)
If your video card is more than a couple of years old, you are pretty much out of luck. It turns out that Spore Creature Creator uses Pixel Shading 2.0 (which requires DirectX 9.c and full hardware acceleration), and some graphics cards are just plain incompatible with it.
Got to the Directory Windows -> System32 and doubleclick "DXDIAG.exe".
Go to the Display (3rd tab from the left). There should be a field called "DirectX-Functions".
In my case, Direct Draw, D3D and the last one were disabled. I reactecated DDraw and everything jumped to active. Tried to run Spore and other Games and everything works again.