Return of Reckoning

What is strange is I have this exact same problem and message on my new dell laptop running Windows 8, so the Direct X is the latest version available.

I'm being driven insane- I keep getting a dll error message which stops the game from running-- specifically, it claims the following dll is missing:

d3dx9_34dll

I downloaded the entire DirectX 9C runtime from Microsoft and had all the files put into the WAR folder as suggested in the one tech ...