Slitherine

I received my beta invite this morning - totally unexpected (I forgot that I applied). After downloading and installing, I went to run the game. The first thing it did was search for and find today's update. While downloading the update, it froze at the 90% mark for about 3 minutes, then finally finished the download and installed. The game started, I got the splash screen, and right at the point that it says "installing GUI", it crashed on me. This happens every time.

Thinking it might be a Windows 8 issue I tried running it in compatability mode for Vista. Same story - it always crashed when trying to create the GUI.

For the record my system far exceeds recommended specs, let alone minimum:

3.34 Gb Intel I3 processor
8 Gb RAM
Geforce 650 TI card with 1Gb Vram (before anyone suggests installing new drivers, I have had this card less than a week. Drivers are up to date, and it flawlessly handles anything I throw at it).
1 Tb hard drive

I'll try rebooting my rig to see if that makes a difference, but I'll be surprised if it does.

Having a very similar issue, had to repeat the download once to get the file, and then it crashes at Loading GUI. However, I'm less upset about this than our OP. Advice on solutions?

I had this issue in Linux too. I did a little bit of digging and found that the latest update appears to expect the following directory to exist under 'Pandora Beta':
Data/Audio/Sounds/Languages
However, the updater removed it, and instead created a directory named:
Data/Core/Languages.

Try copying "Data/Core/Languages" to "Data/Audio/Sounds/Languages", then start the launcher and skip any updates. This fixed it for me. Hopefully not too much is different regarding your directory structures in Windows.

Yup, looks like that was it. Nice fix. That solved it nicely.

That seems to have worked for me as well. Thanks

Thank you, applied this fix and reboot my pc and all is working now!