So today I'm starting the game and it works when freshly extracted from the zip. I made some windows settings changes because indexing (well, searching for apps by typing in start) wasn't working. One of the things I did besides few GPEDIT and registry changes was deleting my user's locale folder (which got re-created at next boot). Perhaps that's related or my system is/was messed up in just some other way.
Anyways, now it's working. Thanks for the help and sorry for this weird non-reproducible error.