Whatever I try, this function call fails

I initialized the session as

mfxVersion version;

version.Major = 1;

version.Minor = 0;

session.init( MFX_IMPL_SOFTWARE, &version )

Which does not return error.

Any ideas what could be the problem,

From what I saw in my debugger

libmfxsw32.dll gets loaded

I am running this on pretty old hardware: Intel Pentium(R0 M @ 2.00GHz with windows7, 32 bit

Could this have something to do with it ? What is the minimum required hardware in order to do software H264 decoding ?

Thanks for any hints,

Bob