I had a similar problem last night with a freshly downloaded copy of Starry Night 6 Download Edition on my Vista box with an ATI Radeon 9600 video card. It failed to run and crashed as it was building the databases. It complained about the lack of OpenGL too - but stated that it was OK to run without it - some features would be missing, that''s all.
I tried to alter the compatibility settings as Doug has mentioned, but it didn't work either. Same problem.
I then downloaded the ATI "Catalyst" program which includes the latest OpenGL-enabled drivers for ATI cards and ran it. Microsoft has not yet provided drivers, ex-Vista install, that allow OpenGL to function properly. I gues that OpenGL competes with DirectX, so of course they are slow to embrace the fact that people run OpenGL. The Catalyst install fixed this and provided a solution. ATI were the problem here, not Vista.
Starry Night 6 worked perfectly after this.
So - if you have an ATI card - go here and download Catalyst:
http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html
Cheers
Chris