Had issues with Win 7, but it turns out that they were right(surprisingly)... it was the drivers for my nvidia mobile graphics card(im running on a sony vaio laptop).
I still have some pop-ins but other than that, I can totally play! I have had this game for about a week before I was able to play it, and I was able to get the right drivers because I found a guide to force the nvidia reference drivers onto my laptop.
http://blog.komeil.com/2010/04/nvidia-driver-windows-7-notebook-laptop.html