not for the playable part of the game. the launcher does use it in the actual game. not sure about the benchmark launcher though. still a good idea to keep IE up to date even if you dont use it because a lot of programmers use the framework of IEs core to program neat little things. I don't agree with using it but it was there so people took advantage of it.
make sure you download the "directx runtime redistributable from june 2010" though it could be a large part of the reason it won't run.(and no I don't know why microsoft doesn't have windows install those libraries by default but it doesn't)
