ditto the beginning movie clip wouldnt play at the beginning but never caused a crash...?

I been getting the black screen after the opening movie in rebellion after the 1a patch. I just get a black screen and a blinking cursor, sound plays, and if you click the right spots you can navigate the menu's blind.

The game doesn't minidump so I can't do #2 on that list.....

I made a post in an old thread regarding this problem, sent in a support ticket with the required files and got no response.  I assume no progress?

edit: tried to force the game to start in windowed mode, still crashes

I have a noticeable pause at a blank/black screen at startup on an i7 with 16Gb RAM - my mates with slower PCs say the screen can stay for a few minutes at a time. Are most people going to wait that long or just assume it's hanging?

I can't play the beta to day which I pre order today because of this black screen I tried offline mode and admin. Today im a sad panda:(

I've had this happen before...I don't have any files to give you but I was personally able to get this problem to manifest itself many times...

I usually do a clean reinstall of my OS every couple of months...after drivers and my internet browser, the first thing I'd usually install would be Impulse and then Sins (Diplomacy and Entrenchment as separate downloads, not trinity) so it could download while I'd be updating other things...

It would turn out that I would always be able to run Sins fine the first time, but after that initial launch, the game would always crash upon start-up...clearing everything in AppData did not help, and so I'd always have to reinstall the game in order to play it again...after reinstalling the game, I'd never see the problem again...

This has happened every time I've reinstalled windows 7 (about 5-6 times) except the most recent time, where I installed impulse and sins after installing MS Office and a few other programs...

I assumed it was because I had some bad sector on my hardrive or something, and Sins (since it was always installed first ) just kept being put there after each time the OS was re-installed...strangely, no such bad sector has ever been detected and no other program has had this program, so maybe it was a different issue...

I know this is not rebellion or trinity, but it is diplomacy and it did occur consistently multiple times under the same conditions...sorry if this isn't particularly useful but it's all I got....

i usually just get a blank black screen when i start up the game, but when i alt+tab to something else and them go back to the game the starting video begins.  i seem to need to do this pretty much every time i want to play.  i have no idea if is related to the issue here though.

just a thing that i see: i have the ffdshow videocodecpack installed. this pack asks me if it should be used for sins. I can remember that i had installed k-lite codecpak before it. this pack just jumped in if some games play bik videos and the game crashed. 

so my tip for blackscreencrashers: uninstall all codecpacks and try again...

Seriously? No update on this yet? Not even an acknowledgement? What is going on? Are Nightraid3r and I the only people with the problem? What's the deal?

This is typical the first few times Sins starts up either after install or after it has not been played for some time. The more you play it the less that wait is. Typically if you play once a week you shouldn't see a wait of more than 10-15 seconds during startup unless you restarted recently, then it might be closer to 20-25 seconds.

This is normal.

I had this problem too, but after verifying the game cache twice it started working.  I don't have the minidump files anymore, but sent a copy to stardock.