Well well, I get the "essential components are missing"-error on this laptop when I installed and tried to launch the latest Galaxy. I earlier had some older Galaxy version on this working, but uninstalled it.
Beta... I think on my other laptop it still worked fine, at least the last time I tried. Oh well, not in a hurry personally to use it anyway. Uninstalled it for now, I'm using my GOG games without the Galaxy client at least for now (and probably beyond).
EDIT: Maybe my problem is related to this:
http://mantis.gog.com/view.php?id=1868#c4569 Ie., if you uninstall and re-install Galaxy to a different place than before (like I did), there is still some registry entry pointing to the old installation location.
EDIT2: Yep, there are some Galaxy registry entries left behind to the Windows registry, even after Galaxy uninstallation. ImagePath is still pointing to the directory where I originally installed Galaxy. Maybe removing those entries manually fixes it... Why is it so hard for applications to tidy up the registry completely, after uninstallation? Is that just the nature of the beast, some things just tend to be left there?