Had some problems getting the game to run, but I eventually figured out that it was my antivirus' fault. Each time I tried to run a fresh install of the game, my antivirus (Avast) took ~10 seconds to scan the .exe file for viruses, and eventually said it was safe each time. I think the issue was that as the game tries to boot up, the antivirus interrupts it in order to do the scan, and somehow the interruption messes things up and causes the program's startup code to break, which is why it does nothing each time I try to run it thereafter.