I've just upgraded my PC (new motherboard and CPU) and since then even tough I've reinstalled everything (including windows) I just can't make Blender work anymore. It just crashes on startup.
AMD FX 6300 6 core CPU
ASROCK 970 Pro3 R2.0 motherboard
AMD Sapphire Radeon HD 6750 video card
There are three main causes so far for problems like this.
You really really really need windows to run all windows updates on windows vista or 7. For windows 7 you need SP1 installed and for Vista you need to be fully updated.
Please check this, it is the most common cause of these problems...
Having PYTHONPATH, PYTHONHOME or any python related environment variables causes blender to try and use an incompatible version of python.
Even the official windows 3.4 python is currently incompatible as that is compiled with Visual Studio 2010 and does not include a proper manifest. Loading that will crash 100% either silently of with a message like the one posted above.
Please make sure there are no PYTHON related environment variables set.
Please test with a software opengl driver (64 bit Windows, or 32 bit Windows).
(shamelessly copied from @Martijn Berger (juicyfruit) ;) ).
My windows 7 is up to date, and I don't currently have Python installed.
But there is a opengl32.dll in my system files dating back to 2009, but my operating system wont let me replace it because "I don't have permission"
Alright, the 32 bit version seems to be working. But my windows is 64 bit as always was, and I've never encountered a problem like this.
We cannot fix these platform specific issues, without being able to reproduce them.
Btw: You should copy the opengl dll files next to the blender.exe, and *not* into your system directory.
I copied it into both direcories.
But my video card has recently started to rapidly loose performance, which might be the reason why blender wasn't working properly.
Thanks for the help, and sorry for wasting your time :(