Do you have enough free space on your c: drive, and (if different) the drive you installed the game to? You could run a ScanDisk (right click on the hard drive in Windows Explorer or My Computer, select Properties, switch to the Tools tab, and hit the Check Now button in the Error Checking Status section).
Did you right click on the shortcut / executable and run the game as administrator?
Did you run the configuration program first? Starting the game for the first time should automatically bring it up (or at least did in the disk release), but if it didn't maybe it would help to start it yourself first.
In Vista/7 right click on the shortcut for the game and select Properties, then in the compatibility options set it to run in Win98/ME mode. This will prevent the occurrence of a rare bug in Vista/7 that can corrupt equipment, and can change the way Windows treats the game, which may avoid the error you are getting.
Under Vista/7, depending on how the user accounts are set up, if you install the game to the default Program Files path, Windows can create separate savegame folders for each user, and then map that folder to the game's savegame folder (so it will just see the saves for the relevant user). Using the compatibility mode should disable this.
Try deleting the files config.div, slashed.cfg and slashed-d3d6.cfg in the Beyond Divinity folder (if they exist), to force the configuration program to recreate them the next time it (or the game) is started.
With the disk versions, at least one person with BD and a couple with DD had problems with the games creating the initial configuration files, but they would work fine if they already existed. Here are my
BD configuration files, if you want to give them a shot; unzip into your Beyond Divinity folder.
You could try uninstalling the game (or just delete the Beyond Divinity folder) and reinstall it in a different folder (ie c:\games\etc rather than the default Program Files path).
In Windows Explorer, you can browse to the '..\Beyond Divinity\Static' folder, and rename the 'intro.mpg' file, if you wish to skip it on startup. It may not help with the error, but it is at least one less thing for the game to have to do at startup.
