Other than updating your video drivers to the latest version we haven't made progress.

Here's the issue in a nutshell:

The Political Machine uses DirectX 9. Most drivers, even unupdated, should work fine with it.  But some don't.

Why DirectX 9 on a game as visually"simple" as vThe Political Machine? Two main reasons: 1) The fonts. Notice how nice the fonts are in this game compared to other computer games you've played in the past. DirectX 9 is the first version of DirectX that allows seamless use of True Type Fonts. 

And

2) It allows us to have our cake and eat it to with 3D - we can intermix sprites and 3D to have the best of both worlds without having to create or license an advanced 3D engine.  So we get to have features like zooming in and rotating of sprites and resizing of sprites all the on fly in hardware.  That means that if your video card is properly supporting DirectX 9, you can literally play the game on a 8 year old PC and have it be very nice and fast.

But, we have found TWO video card cases where the default drivers don't work.  First is the ATI Radeon IGP.  This is fixed by updating the drivers to the latest version (see the video driver thread to get a link).  The other, and much more common, are the older Intel integrated adapters.  We haven't heard from users who have gone and downloaded the latest drivers and then tried it (too oftne people will get the game working and disappear and not give us feedback).

What we are working on is to see what precisely it is about these two cards that they don't support to see if we can do a work around for them.  But we've had limited success because both of them are integrated into laptops or budget PCs (i.e. we can't just go onto ebay and buy the video card).

So that's where we're at.