A couple things I noticed when installing.
The game doesn’t seem to ask if you want to have an icon on the desktop, it just does it 
Also, I noticed there’s a little mini dxsetup folder in the installed folder, but he installation routine doesn’t appear to actually run the dxsetup in there. As a result, the presumably required dll that the game was developed with D3DX9_41.dll from march of 2009 doesn’t get placed into the windows folder on installation (my last one was _40).
I went ahead and ran the DXSETUP.exe in the gratuitious folder just to make sure I got the dll, and sure enough it installed the _41 dll for dx9.
This may or may not fix some people’s issues, having the specific dll that the game was developed with missing can cause all sorts of problems that I’ve seen people have before Anyway, I’d suggest having it run in the installation routine, that would help avoid any potential issues from this.
I would also suggest that anyone having problems with the game first run that dxsetup file in the GSB folder, or else run the one from MS’s webpage to make sure you have the latest version of the dx refresh (which is march of 2009). If anyone hasn’t run a dx update since march, they probably should do it.
microsoft.com/downloads/deta … laylang=en