ApostropheST

Nope, the issue is definitely isolated to the disparity between desktop color depth and game color depth. I hope feedback from other who have had this problem and your own testing can shed some more light on this.

Okay, in the game, I noticed all of your video display options use 32-bit color. It may be that there's an issue when the game initializes, though I've never seen that in another game/app. I'm on a laptop, native resolution of 1680x1050, and the game has to change my screen's resolution to fit it. The crash occurs after making this change. I'll see if I can run the game at native resolution. I'll post results in a moment.

POSSIBLE FIX?: Right click desktop > Properties. Settings tab. Change color quality to Highest (32 bit). --- I've been able to reproduce this problem. I had the same issue. I did not have any of the three OpenAL files in my system32 directory, so they were not the culprit. I, too, had DropTeam.log list my drivers as Microsoft drivers, despite having the latest Omega ATI drivers. I was running my desktop on 16-bit color (to accomodate an older game) instead of 32-bit color, which I normally run (and which apparently most people do nowadays). Switching to 32-bit color, the game ran, and DropTeam.log showed my video information correctly. I went back to 16-bit color and it crashed again, so I was able to isolate the issue. Not sure what's causing that. I'll try to work with you guys. For now, see if this fix works.