I can get this to crash on another machine with an:
"Unhandled exception at 0x00000000 in acknex.exe
0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000000"

Poking around, it doesn't look like the t7.dll is getting loaded, which would explain the error message, but I'm not sure why it wouldn't load.

Shot in the dark, but are either of you running the debug version of d3d9? (Use dxdiag to find out).

Oh, and if you can check which dlls are being loaded, that would be great too. Run with "-diag" flag and look at the resulting acklog.txt. The line "t7.dll opened" should appear after all the "PATH" lines.