All,
I had trouble with launching DDO like most of you. Symptom is that the application freezes at the updater/motd which now has the monk as the splash screen. I have heard Run as Administrator works for some. However, it didn't work for me.
What did work is logging off my Win7 current account and logging into the account I had originally installed the application on (the computer's admin account). After I did this, the updater began downloading. It's still in progress at the moment. I just wanted to start the thread to help everyone out.