Yeah, you guys hit the nail on the head. The launcher doesn't really like to work if you don't have openal installed. Considering that you have a 7300gt is a lot better than having a 7300gs. So, yeah you should be able to play the game just fine in all reality, but it might not exactly be the best experience. The radeon 9600se can load the game in fact also (lower end than the 9600), but it wasn't exactly the greatest game experience. I always got considerable slow down when chasing an enemy really closely, as oppposed to an enemy being farther away. This has also lead to me desiring more than 512mb system ram for the game as well. Hard drives use their virtual memory a lot more with 512mb system ram compared to more smooth performance with a gig of ram (512mb always gave me slight hiccups, that were very frequent even when i upgraded to a radeon 9800 with the 3.6.8mvp's, hell with 512mb system ram i still had slight frequent hiccups all the time with F.E.A.R.).