Crash on startup

I have a Dell ultrabook that I've been playing Sins on for a few years...until v1.90/1.91. Now it just crashes almost immediately on starting (splash loading screen), whereas all prior versions worked OK.

Not sure what changed with the game to cause this. I verified I have the latest drivers for everything and I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game several times.

The crash screen shows this:

  Problem Event Name:    APPCRASH
  Application Name:    Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion.exe
  Application Version:    1.9.1.0
  Application Timestamp:    59c26d37
  Fault Module Name:    ntdll.dll
  Fault Module Version:    6.1.7601.23864

It doesn't look like there's a minidump file or anything else being created.

Not sure if this is related, but I also tried starting with Dev exe, and I get the following output before the game window closes:

Could not extract Image Info from Texture: .\Textures\Buttons_Research2_Disabled.dds
Does the file exist?

Assert @ D:\SinsRebellion\main\CodeSource\Engine/Render/Texture/FileTexture.cpp(502)
DirectXAssert: [!FAILED(dxVerifyHR)]
Context: Can't create texture: .\Textures\Buttons_Research2_Disabled.dds
HR: (D3DXERR_INVALIDDATA)-Invalid data

In case this has anything to do with DirectX, I know DirectX10 has some issues on this machine, as there is another game I play on it where I had to force DirectX 9 to be used for it to work.

OS is Windows 7x64, with all the current updates.

Any ideas?