How about waiting all this time to start the game and if you hit the WINkey or even exit the game you get a very nice BSOD :( Ive seen this happen to quite a few people so far and it sux... No its not my machine (fx53, 1024mb ram, 6800 ultra sata HDDs) Graphics are sweet though what I can see... Cant even see my character lol.

I haven't had any problems. I'm running a AMD Sempron 3100+ (Socket 754), SATA HDD, GeForce FX 5600 ULTRA, 1GB PC2700 DDR RAM, Audigy, WinXP SP2. I do find I get a big performance boost by running it with settings on Medium (shadows High, Simple water reflection, low shader detail). These settings don't reduce visual quality very much. Still looks great.

Must have been a problem with steam, took me about 2mins.. Unless you hadnt gone up to preload 7 already?

well a worldwide lauch brought steam servers to their knees. i've had no problem starting the game after i registred. so just give it a bit of time and let the traffic drop a bit.

oh okay.. :(