OK, I had been looking (not very hard) for a copy of this game for a couple of years now. And today I finally decided to look a little harder and found the SCP and Turey's installer and everything. So I then spent numerous hours letting Turey's installer download and install everything.
After that, I downloaded and installed the latest version of OpenAL from their website.
I then restarted my computer.
Then I browsed to my installation directory and started up the Launcher.exe program, pointed it to fs2_open_3_6_9.exe and clicked Apply. Then I did all of the settings configuration stuff the way I want them (or at least the way I think I want them... can't be sure 'til I can actually play). I clicked on Apply numerous times as I went through this. When I was finished, I clicked OK.
After that I started up the Launcher.exe program again and verified that everything was still the way I had set it before, and then clicked Run. My mouse cursor turned into it's "working in background" cursor for a brief while, then turned back to normal... five minutes later nothing else had happened! So then I tried to simply start fs2_open_3_6_9.exe and had the same result as with the Run button on the launcher.
So I tried downloading the official 3.6.9 release that is linked in this page:
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Installing_fs2_openI extracted those files to the installation directory that I had used with Turey's installer and had it overwrite the files. There was something like a 5 month difference in modification date, but file sizes were the same (Turey's files were newer, but have been overwritten). And I tried it all again... same results. There is no error message or anything, it simply fails to launch the game. Looking through the process list in my task manager does not show any processes associated with the game... I don't know what processes should be there, but I recognize all processes listed and know what they are for, and none of them are from the game except for the Launcher.exe on the occasions when I use the Run button.
I am running WindowsXP Home SP2 on an AMD Athalon 64 3700+ at 2.41 GHz. I have 2GB RAM and a nVidia GeForce 6600 graphics card with 256MB of vid RAM. I have DirectX 9.0c installed. I have on-board sound which is not the greatest sound quality but has never given me any problems in the past. My command line flags (as given in the Launcher.exe window) are as follows...
J:\Programs\Games\Freespace_2\fs2_open_3_6_9.exe -spec -glow -env -jpgtga -mipmap -nomotiondebris -noscalevid -missile_lighting -cache_bitmaps -dualscanlines -targetinfo -orbradar -rearm_timer -ballistic_gauge -ship_choice_3d -3dwarp -warp_flash -snd_preload -alpha_env -ambient_factor 50
That path is correct, including capitalizations (in case that makes a difference).
I really, really hope someone can help me get this to work (preferably without having to download and reinstall the whole thing from scratch again). As near as I can tell from various review sites, Freespace 2 is one of the top rated, if not THE top rated, game in the genre from the last 10 years, and the prospect of finally getting to play it, and even having graphics enhancements from the SCP, has me really excited... and really disappointed since it isn't working yet.

Any and all help is appreciated, but especially if it lets me get this working without downloading another 3+ GB of files.
Drake
Edit/Update: I just tried to launch FreeSpace2.exe and received a pop-up window stating...
Please configure your system in the Launcher before running FS2.
The Launcher will be restarted!
This window has only an OK button. Clicking OK brings up an error pop-up window that says...
Freespace2/Fred2 cannot be run from a drive root directory!
This window also has only an OK button. Clicking OK closes the error window and nothing further seems to take place.