Okay, so this is really two issues.

First, I just bought this game through Impulse. Trying to run it through Impulse brings up the launcher... I think. What it actually does is bring up a bunch of options completely overlaid over each other, in the upper left of my screen. None of them are selectable. Thankfully, the quit button appears somewhere to the right of that mess.

So what I guess (but don't really know) what is the launcher just... fails, for me.

This is how it looks: http://www.glpics.com/rlp/elementalLauncher.png

Happily, I can get around this by running Elemental from Impulse's tray icon, or finding it in the directory and running it from there... but it just crashes after a second or three at the splash/title screen you get immediately after starting the game.

Here's the debug.err: http://pastebin.com/qNNE6N20

Here's that zip file generated whenever the game crashes: http://www.glpics.com/rlp/Elemental1_1-2010-12-16T21-06-31-570.zip

I'd have searched the forums for similar problems, but the search doesn't seem to be working for me.