Problems compiling in Windows

[Urkle]

Couple of things to check out.. Did the Penumbra.exe generate an hpl log (I believe in the My Documents/Penumbra folder)
Also did you RUN the executable from within the "redist" data folder?
Have you tried building a Debug build instead of a Release build and putting a breakpoint on hplMain (in Main.cpp) and walking through the code there to see where it blows up?