As of Monday or Tuesday (I was playing a few days ago), SoSE is hanging in the opening cinematic, just before the logos are starting to be shown. Sometimes the very first logo shows up in the middle of its distorted animation. The first bit of sound repeats like a broken CD player.

The Dev version works, as long as I don't maximize the window.

Fullscreen optimizations are disabled for SoSE.

Disabling Windows Defender's live protection didn't help.

When I verify the game files, Steam consistently says 1 file is bad and will be reacquired.

My settings file has the value:

VideoIsWindowed TRUE

...but the game is not windowed; it remains fullscreen.

The NVIDIA Control Panel has no scaling option that I could find.

When I attempted to update my graphics drivers, I ran into this problem: https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/plt-kb100

I was able to resolve that by installing items said to be missing, one at a time. Specifically, I installed SMBUS, then PSP, then MicroPEP (UPEP in the error message). The Power Management item successfully installs, but it's always marked as not installed when I run the installer again.

Lowering my resolution from 1920x1080 to 1680x1050 didn't help.

Help would be very appreciated.

I encountered these basically identical problems and couldn't get anything to work from the responses:

https://old.reddit.com/r/RealTimeStrategy/comments/f8ly2h/sins_of_a_solar_empire_rebellion_not_working/

https://old.reddit.com/r/SoSE/comments/isovj5/i_cant_launch_rebellion/

https://old.reddit.com/r/RealTimeStrategy/comments/qljxjm/sins_of_a_solar_empire_rebellion_not_working_help/