Gosh you are right! Turning OFF shadows will crash it for the next run! I thought I had tested all that!
Thanks so much for the feedback and your debugging. You are a gentleman and a scholar! I shall fix that for next release and sorry for the trouble!
For those of you who are running into this problem, you can fix it like AlsoKnown did above (using a text editor to change the value of shadows tag to true) OR...just delete the Settings.xml file and let the program recreate it - shadows are on by default. Of course, low end machines might still have trouble with shadows and FPS may drop.
Where is the Settings.xml file located? Same directory where the program is: .../Documents/Archipelago or from the main menu, select Options/Application Folder