Just had this issue, tried starting FE several times to have it lock up on the FE screen, the icon would turn to a sword then nothing.  Tried a good 5-6 times.  Never had that problem in other versions.  Ultimately I did resolve this by setting the FE .exe file to a trusted file by my antivirus program, and was able to properly load the game.

Still, I didn't have to do this with the previous versions of FE (or WOM) so I'm not sure if there's something new on load with FE 0.77 that has been introduced (or perhaps if its the AV program that got sneakily patched and is more critical of something in the loadup).

Thought I'd toss it out there though for consideration, and if anyone else has this issue.