I'm a hair away from slamming my head against a wall.

I've tried everything I could look up to get Demonicon to work. I just tried uninstalling and putting it on another drive and going through each step again. And it seems like half of today's internet isn't aware of my problem.

Reinstalled (C drive)
Deactivated antivirus for verify & run
Added antivirus exceptions for .exe files
Closed browser
Shortcut made with -dx9 added to Target in Properties
Run as admin
Run compatibility mode (for each version of Windows available)
Installed a codec (K-Lite, deinstalled)

OS/Sys: Win11, 64-bit
Video - AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT
CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core
RAM - 32GB
Sound - AMD Streaming Audio
Space for days
1600x900 screen

So it starts as a background process, gets suspended and then closes. I don't have config files, it's that bad. So if a fix suggestion requires going into a config/ini file, you'd have to provide it for me. But I do have logs.

With shortcut -dx9, I get 6 resource leaks at the end.

Without shortcut, the leaks are still there, but the game does try to start according to the log:
WARNING: Starting game (MainThread|GameLauncher::start|src\users\default.cpp|193) time:2.801261 (4:6:45.758)
but it gets the "access violation" exception. I don't know what this stuff means.