Yeah, I have fully updated drivers for my video card, sound card, et al.
I didn't think that was really relevant until after the Starforce check though.
As for other running software, I uninstalled Alcohol (Sacred has problems with it, figured this might too), hit "Disable Auto-Protect" in Norton Anti-virus, and shut down any software that wasn't absolutely necessary and/or interacts with the DVD drive in any way (i.e. eMule, PeerGuardian (eats CPU badly), Ad-Aware, AnyDVD, and anything else that was running in the background) except for Trillian 0.74I and Opera 7.51.
I have two optical drives on my machine, one is a CyberDrive CD-RW and the other an NEC DVD +/- R/RW. The NEC is the only one connected at the moment, and is the drive I installed the game from, and the other drive has spats of not realizing that I've put a disc in the drive, that started back when I installed Gangland (my first StarForce 3 protected title, but that's probably a coincidence).
I just wish I could get <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/beyond.gif" alt="" /> to work. The demo made it seem like it's pretty good, and <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" /> was what made me make the push to buy it, as it was an excellent game.