Ah, the Old Starforce issue? same with Silent Hunter 3 - It's easy enough to remove the drivers that installs on your system after the install.
I experienced problems with it myself with SH3 on my old PC as the DVD drive was rather old and I also have Daemon Tools installed for several Disc images (legal use) and Starforce didn;t like that!
Moving back onto topic with the release date of SOW - I would hope to see it some time in 4th Quarter 2008 but in all realistic scenarios it is going to be put back into 2009 at least - based purely on the lack of updates/ official news/website.
V