I should have read your post before I bought this damn game last night. I never played GoW when it was origianlly released for x360 but wanted to blast through it quick before GoW2 comes out soon.
Well I had a good 5 hours last night of intstall/troubleshoot/uninstall/install again/microsoft support pages/game forums/microsoftLIVE support/update patches for GoW and LIVE/reinstall again AND never got the game to work past the initial press PLAY screen. My PC is less than a year old and has no problem playing graphically demanding games like Crysis or FarCry2. I think the best part of this whole experience happened this morning when I tried to exchange Gears of War for anything else (or a replacement Gears of War for Windows) but could not because I was unable to prove the game to be defective to MicroCenter(the store I bought it from in California) who blamed me, not the product, for any problems and refused me a refund or exchange of same product. I write this post hoping it might save somebody $50, 6 hours of headache, and having to deal with MS game support(or lack of it). I also wrote this as a f@ck you to Microsoft for not fixing any of the known problem issues reported in the gamer/support forums for GoW. There are about 40-60 possible problems reported in the Gears of War for Windows support forums in 2007 and yet when I buy this game yesterday in 2008 there are still no upates, downloads, or ingame support to fix any of these 60 KNOWN issues!!!! It is left entirely up to the consumer to fix Epic games and MS’s faulty product!!! Total Bullsh@t!!!!
As a lifetime user of Microsoft products I have to say that this is the end. I’m buying a MAC(so i can still play WoW) and gaming on my PS3 from now on and not looking back. And I hope MS-Windows7 fails worse than Vista.