I was relegated to playing this on my crappy laptop, as the game would never launch on my gaming PC.

i5 4690k
8 GB
GTX 770
Win 10

Well, tonight I was determined to fix this, and finally play on my PC. Hopefully it helps someone else.
First off, my symptoms were that the game would not launch at all. No splash screen, no pop up window, no crash, nothing at all.

Turns out it was MSI Afterburner causing the issue. Turn off Afterburner, and the game launches without issue.

As for why Afterburner causes the problem, I have no idea. Only game out of 100s that I have seen this.

Oh, and I can replicate this 100%, so it's not a coincidence.

Thank you for telling!

it's actually in the FAQ:

And to be clear, I didn't dig deep to see why Afterburner caused my launch issues. Perhaps it is just a specific tick box or setting in Afterburner and/or something unique to my system and hardware setup. For example, I have an old Logitech G15 keyboard, and I use Afterburner with the option to display stats on the built in LCD of the G15.

Anyways, hope this helps someone else.

I pinpointed the issue.The game does not launch if there is at least one active entry in "Monitoring" tab with "Show in On-Screen Display" option turned on. Having active entries without OSD is fine, and also settings of RivaTuner have no effect at all.

Yet turning off Afterburner is still the best solution :D

doesn't matter too much now - the SS1 EE source port is currently in beta on steam and should be coming to GOG soon enough, solving all compatibility problems of the wrapper in one swoop.

Thank you so much

I don't have the GOG version of this, but the Steam version of the source port update won't even start for me: no error message or anything, and this is supposedly the release version.