He isn't the only one with the issue...
I'll do one better. I just got the " Penumbra Collector Pack" from steam and installed it onto my system; as soon as I did and let it update as necessary I clicked on overture to check it out and bang crash to desktop with this error:
I tried the other 2 games as well and I get the same result....
My system is up to date, I have the latest drivers for everything... here are my specs through speccy:
I am 100% sure my 8800 GT cards can use vertex shaders >.<
EDIT: here is the HPL log....