Did you close impulse after starting Elemental?  The beta needs it to be open

All that is needed is that you've installed Impulse and logged in at least once, which you had to have done to install the game. Impulse does NOT need to be currently running in any way (neither the client nor the tray app).

Make sure that you allow the game through any firewalls you have. It must be able to connect to the server to get the data files upon run.

Thanks Three Kings. Doing what you said it now works for me.

Three Kings Rules!!

Has anybody gotten around this, other than as described above (which doesn't work for me, either)?

I was playing the previous releases fine.  I downloaded the beta, got the error message.  Customer support said download elemental cleaner and reinstall.  I did that and after the LONG redownload same problem.  I thought maybe it was the login, so support showed me where on stardock to update so Impulse can find it... and still no improvement.  It doesn't matter if I have impulse on or off, or which launch method I use...nothing works.

I've tried everything in the forums.

I can't figure it out.  Currently with the O patch, about 2/3 of the time it will load up and the other 1/3 it claims it can't download the datafile.

Release versions work fine.

Maybe it'll get patched into normality.

Same issues as Michaelus here.  Login from shift-tab results in the above error. 

There is a small thread about this in the support forum.

You can esc past this problem.  Literally just hit esc on the splash screen and you can play, not logged in.

I had this problem also, used the shift tab, went to login in, and changed to my new password (I had changed my password since I bought the game).  I had to do this even though I was logged into impluse just fine.  I think this has something to do with the achievements they have added.

Another person posted that they had changed their e-mail and this caused that problem.

Possibly trying to loggin with your forum name instead of your e-mail might also help?