Game crashes on startup

I bought Hero Academy on Steam last night. I had hoped to play the game a fair bit through Sat. to see if I liked it well enough to invest in the other teams while they are still on sale. (I even bought the two pack - hope my friend has better luck with it than I do) 
Disappointingly - that's not going to happen. Hero Academy crashes on startup for me.
I get the "Hero Academy" splash screen - then immediately thereafter Windows pops up with a "Hero Academy Not Working" error. (i.e. - "A problem has cause the program to stop working correctly, please close the program").
 
I verifiyed the game cache on steam, exited/restarted steam, rebooted my puter, updated my video drivers, etc. No go.
 
Windows 7 - 64 bit, Radeon 4850, Core 2 duo 3ghz
- No other problems running much more complex games. (Including OMD)
 
Any help?
Thanks