It was revealed on the official forum that Tribes of the East has no copy-protection, not even Securom. Kudos to Ubisoft for making the lives of its legit customers easier! To think that nearly two years ago we were the guinea-pigs of that thing called Starforce. A lot of things have changed.

Elsewhere, Kevin Sung (lotusreaver at the Round Table) found out that in addition to restoring your faith in Heroes of Might and Magic V, the Tribes of the East demo can resolve the DirectX 9 issues you might have.

"As you know, DirectX 10 is separate from DirectX 9 and the files don’t overlap. As a result, lots of DX9 compatible games don’t work on a system with only DX10. Well, up until yesterday, if you wanted to play Heroes of Might and Magic V, you would have to install DX9. And based on reports, this had the possibility to screwing up your computer. But if you really wanted to play the game, you’d have to take the chance. Otherwise, a message would pop up upon running H5_game.exe, alerting you to several missing files. Thanks to Ubisoft’s Tribes of the East demo, (...), these problems are gone. Heroes V and Hammers of Fate run great. Why did installing a demo fix my games’ incompatibility with DX10. I have no idea. Perhaps the TotE demo overwrote some files in the Heroes V folder?"

We can't make any promise regarding the results of that fix, but if DirectX is causing you problems, you might want to give it a shot.