I get the error message "Can't Create DirectInput" 4 times of 5 times running an esenthel application. That counts for the esenthel editor as well as every demo program compiled with it. Starting the application with administrative rights didn't help, it happens with both 32 bit and 64 bit esenthel application. Latest DXSDK version is installed. Does anyone happen to have a hint ?

Second (but small) problem: The Esenthel 64bit application runs fine, but the 32 bit version of the esenthel editor cannot open the visual studio WDExpress.exe compiler even though the path is correct, is this normal on a 64bit system or do i need to set something somewhere ?

I run a Win7 pro 64bit OS on an intel i7 system with 8 GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 570 graphics adapter.

Sounds like antivirus is blocking the application, this happens in Avast "Can't create DirectInput" happens if deepscreen wants to do a first time scan. It might also be some other program that is blocking the process.

Just my thoughts on the issue you are experiencing.

Thanks, great hint ! That was a direct hit:
As it seems, the avast deepscreen thing seems to cause problems for a lot of "indirect" visual studio activity (vs from its own IDE worked fine before). HOWEVER - and this is strange - the problems do still exist even when avast protection services are disabled in the program, so when i turned off avast yesterday the error still occured and i thought it might not be the thing to blame, and searched elsewhere.

Thankfully, avast has a lot of options and thus excluding the file paths to the microsoft/windows/directx SDKs and the esenthel folders completely solved all of the above effects.
It's running fine now !

Glad that this got sorted out, thanks Zervox for the suggestion!