Yep, I've had this happen before. Try (Very Carefully) checking and/or updating your firmware, and IDE drivers. Also, try rebooting, and enabling the Optical drive to boot after the Hard Disk.
Have you looked on the Steam support site, or used the Bug/Error report tool? I would recommend not playing it, until you can get some info on the problem.
Yes, Dell has some pretty high standards on their equipment. My 2nd computer was a Dell that I got about 8 years ago, and it's still running strong today. It's too bad a lot of people carry around false statements from 'horror stories' related to them, that are around the internet. Kinda like...
I've heard about this happening before, and the reason Quicktime doesn't do this is it has something to do with using the codecs internally, rather than having them linked to libraries externally.
You can try VLC, but I doubt it will solve all problems. A quick solution would be to reboot. I'm...
Ok, I've got 2 guest passes for RO. They expire soon, so I've gotta give them out.
Anyone interested?
If you're on my friends list, then I can just send it, if not PM or post your email.