PC FFXI not starting.Follow

I recently repurchased FFXI to get back into it, went through the painful 4 hours installation+update, and now when i hit the play button, i get a black screen for a split second and then i am sent back to my desktop with POL closed.

I tried updating drivers for my video card, got the newest october release of DX9, tried setting the FFXI graphics to minimum, reinstalled the game twice, turned off the firewall and the damn thing still isn't lauching.

I have a P4 3.2ghz, BFG6800GS OC and 1GB RAM.

I saw a lot of similar complaints in the first 20 pages of the forums but nobody seems to have found a fix so i'm posting this hoping someone has finally found the answer.

Thank you for your help.