The black screen symptoms he is referring to, I believe, can be checked by going into options and then "pilot". Where the pilot would be there is only a black rectangle.
I installed the patch to see if this patch had fixed it. It hasn't. I could also only work with DX9, but got very low fps. I chalk it up to having an nVidia 330M, which is honestly pretty crappy.
One day I'll get a decent PC though
One day!