City of Heroes and AlienFX

I've been working with CoH Tech Support for awhile now trying to resolve a very specific issue...

Apparently, when City of Heroes starts to loadup and it attempts to "Initialize Hardware Lightning" (i.e. AlienFX) the game instantly crashes with a Kernelbase.dll error.

CoH Tech Support insists it is a known conflict issue with the Alienware Command Center and they insist that I uninstall it....which is just stupid.

I want to keep the functionality of my M11x while playing one of my longtime favorite games.....I've tried having AlienFX deny 3rd party users as well as disabling it in Startup and the game crashes all the same...CoH Staff says the game automatically attempts to activate AlienFX regardless unless you uninstall all the software for it...

PLEASE give me some suggestions on how to fix this....I will be most grateful.