Can't get this to work at all, it's not even appearing as an active process when run through steam. If I run it through steam, it shows the preparing to launch dialogue box for about half a second before it goes away, and if I just try running the exe by itself, I get "The application was unable to start correctly (0xc00007b)". So far I've verified integrity of game cache, manually ran the vcredist / dxsetup (did this because the first time setup was not automatically running), did a clean install on Steam and from the downloadable .exe from direct2drive, checked my windows updates and made sure all my relevant drivers were current, deleted clientregistry.blob, checked that I wasn't forcing triple buffering, pretty much all the obvious possible solutions. The only change I've been able to make so far was that running the .exe directly used to instantly crash it with an error mentioning that I was missing pdh.dll. That changed to the above mentioned crash message when I ran the vcredist and dxsetup files.

http://pastebin.com/cjhwrd6J

Still can't play, still haven't made any progress, only difference now is that running the .exe gives a "The program can't start because pdh.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem." I've reinstalled the crap out of it from steam and direct2drive, and short of literally shaking my computer, I have no idea what to try next, with the exception of feeling like I got hoodwinked and trying to get my damn money back.