Character gender does not have any impact, except cosmetically. In Divine Divinity (DD) there were one or two minor conversation differences between male and female characters, but AFAIK this is not the case in Beyond Divinity (BD).
Only a small percentage of people have run into a problem with Starforce (the drivers will not install under the 64 bit version of Windows, so that may be a problem if you are an early adopter and do not dual boot or otherwise have access to a 32 bit version of Windows). Some people are critical of Starforce, though I don't know (and have not checked) if it causes more problems than any other copy protection scheme.
Domo arigato
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