Either one of them are corrupt, or your graphics card driver is out of date. First thing I would do is make sure that your graphics card driver is up to date, in that case. And then if that does not work, I would uninstall and reinstall SlimDX and DirectX 9.0c to make sure that there are no issues there. You can also look in the AI War folder to see if a more specific error has been logged, and then post that here.
It does occur to me that you might be able to get this error if .NET 2.0 is corrupt on your machine, or was installed but then was uninstalled. That can cause issues with SlimDX, and might be the issue. If you never had .NET 2.0 that would be no problem, but having uninstalled it often leaves behind some crud in windows that can cause problems with applications that were originally compiled against .NET 2.0.