I installed vendetta on my gentoo system with a gf4200ti. Running it in ~/bin/vendetta brings up the update screen. it updates and then allows me to click the play button. Then, nothing happens.

Running ~/.vendetta/vendetta does also nothing. It does not exit back to shell; it just sits there and does absolutely nothing. No network communication, and top does also not show it doing anything. (also no text on the console)

What can I do to get it started?

The file errors.log shows this:
[Thu Jun 7 17:09:58 2007] Found driver: "ALSA driver". Type 1, Version 8.1. Load @0x08382228
[Thu Jun 7 17:09:58 2007] Instantiate address: 0xb7f9ba40
[Thu Jun 7 17:09:58 2007] Found driver: "Open Sound System driver". Type 1, Version 8.1. Load @0x08382e30
[Thu Jun 7 17:09:58 2007] Instantiate address: 0xb7381370
[Thu Jun 7 17:09:58 2007] Found driver: "OpenGL Reference GKGL driver". Type 5, Version 70.0. Load @0x08383108
[Thu Jun 7 17:09:58 2007] Instantiate address: 0xb7285480

other games work?

Yes, other games work without problems (q4, ut2k4, savage, ...)

Is something using your sound device, perhaps? Some drivers will block the open() call for the device when vendetta tries to poll it, which is really annoying.

Try cd ~/.vendetta; strace ./vendetta

Today, after having shut down my computer for the night, Vendetta runs without problems.

I use ALSA with dmix; and I tried playing music and using mplayer when starting Vendetta today. All of this works - really strange, but at least it's working.