I'm 99% sure that tony hawks 2 will work with no 3rd party peripherals plugged in and if you are using a memory card that is not a sony official one.

How do i know this? well i have an official sony memory card with official sony joypads and no other third party peripherals plugged into my psx (except of course, my modchip =p) and tony hawks 1 and 2 (both backups) work with no problems what-so-ever.

So it sounds like third party products seem to be causing the problem here, but if u unplug them when the game is saving then everything should work OK.

l8er,

4nim4l.