Someone who likes torture?? - Win 7 64 aint that brisk on an i7 quad core 3.5Ghz with 6GB of RAM - ever considered Win XP :)
If you have installed it as above - what Direct X pack did you reinstall exactly - the one given in the patch read mes?
Do you change the advanced settings for wov in the Nvidia advanced settings - could something there be the issue?
Other than that it could be maybe something in the registry - interestingly I haven't fully installed any of the first gen games on here - they are just copies of the game folder from my last PC - thats First Eagles 2008, ODS(WOE 2008), YAP1 & 2 (WOV 2006)
Have you got a backed up copy of the wov folder you could just stick on and try??