I was getting d3d errors trying to launch the game like several other people who have posted. For me the game did not start at all, I got the error after the screen turned black a moment - no amount of installing drivers, direct3d or other software worked.
The solution was simple - for some reason the game did not like my default desktop resolution of 1280x768 widescreen. I switched to 1024x768 and launched the game, once it had written its ini files using this resolution and I had exited I could reset my desktop to 1280x768 and run the game with no further issues.
This is probably only the solution in a very limited number of cases but I hope it helps some other users out there
