Warhammer woes

After eventually patching the game by leaving the PC on overnight. I woke up to excitedly hit the Play button. Straight away I got an error.

The application has failed to start because d3dx9_34.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem

Now despite what the message says I seriously doubt that reinstallation will fix the issue. This appears to be a DirectX 9 file and I am using Windows Vista which has DirectX 10 with it.

As this is the sort of thing that you would expect to be resolved after the beta testing I went to look on the Warhammer Online forums only to find there aren't any and that there are no plans for any. They state that there are a number of independent community forums some of which they support. What that surely means in practice is that anyone can say whatever they want on these forums with no regard for the consequences, even if the comments are well meant.

Given that there are no forums I decided to try the technical support, again, surely something like this would have been found in the beta and there will be something in the FAQ. There is a specific section on DirectX however nothing in there suggests that the game needs a specific version or how to resolve my issue. Instead there is some non technical information about DirectX generally. Google couldn't find anything on the site either

This is not a good start at all. One comment I found on the web suggested that someone has installed DirectX9 onto Vista. If this is the only option then I may be looking for a refund as I doubt that my machine will be supported by Microsoft if I downgrade some of the integral software.

Having said all this, I know people with Vista who have the game running, surely they can't all have downgraded DirectX. The search for the fix continues... for now.