Good news is, holding shift successfully brings up the renderer select screen. Bad news is, no matter what renderer I choose, I get the same result. Would either of the log files help at all?
What's extra weird is that I have a folder with a copy of 0.6.13r3 in it, and that runs just fine, but as soon as I overwrite it with the latest version, i get crashes. Even weirder is that I previously had 0.6.16r1 in use (i have a save), but I can't get that to work anymore either.
real strange.
Edit: I've been slowly overwriting 6.13r3 with newer versions and have managed to get 0.6.15r3 to work again...but still going up to 0.6.16r1 and beyond is causing issues (i take it back, it ran once or twice, and now it's back to not working...weird. So 0.6.14r1 works consistently, but once i get to 0.6.15r3 and beyond, it either just doesn't work, or works inconsistently. :/ )