I also had problems with a black screen and a startup error, here is what helped me:
- in dxcfg I disabled Aspect ratio correction, Anisotropic filtering and Antialiasing, manually set the resolution of my screen and turned on Fullscreen;
- in STConfig, I turned off the Startup video option, and left the rest of the settings on.
Be careful when changing some settings in dxcfg, all settings in STConfig are reset, so configure them in this order - first dxcfg, then STConfig.
My laptop has Windows 7 32 bit installed. In the future, I did not experience problems with the speed of the game and folding it into a tray.

Just reporting: Win10 x64 fast machine. Working out of the box, except for intro videos black - which I skip anyway.
But this Windows installation was newly installed 2011 with win7 64 bit, and then upgraded to 8.0, 8.1 and then every Win10 version + 4 * CPU swap (Intel, then Intel, then AMD, and again AMD) + 3 * Mainboard exchange.
So I may be lucky to have the .dlls which this game likes, and the 400+ other installed games too.

The point is: It is probably neither Win7 or Win10, rather than some other compatibility issue.

I get the message "Error reading registry! Reinstall the game!"

Does this mean the game can only be run under administrator mode?

Probably, just like most of the games 20 years ago when every software assumed you are running an administrator account under Windows.

If anyone else is still having issues, I had the same problem on my Win 10 machine but this fixed it:

1. In GOG Galaxy, select the game then click the options button (to the right of the "Play" button at the top) and select "Direct X Settings". Alternatively, run dxcfg.exe from the game install folder
2. In the DirectX configuration, set "Display mode" to your monitor's resolution and refresh rate, and set "Presentation" to Windowed
3. Save then run the game

This worked for me.

In my case on Win10 x64 the fix has been:

1. install DirectPlay (in legacy Windows components)
2. Disable startup video

The thing is when launching from GOG Galaxy it hides errors that show otherwise when running ST.EXE from command line. Quite lame IMHO and does not speak well about Galaxy devs who prefer to hide and ignore error, instead at least show it to the user. I've wasted 40 minutes looking for the issue.

Win11, black screen issues were solved by running as administrator /disabling intro video via stconfig

Thank you, good man!!!!

Have the problem that no solution helps, it comes only a picture with "Submarine Titans" and then it just ends