I am having the exact same problem. I have managed to start the game a few times by spamming the "Run" button in impulse. After 50 or 60 "games played" have incremented, I will get either an error message saying that it can't allocate the thread, or, the game launches. It's a really unpredictable process, and I only have about a 60% success rate with the button-spamming-to-launch. Once the game launches, it works great.
I've tried disabling all of the background processes that are optional or potentially intrusive (antivirus, daemontools, dropbox, etc) but that doesn't seem to make any difference. I have validated the install using impulse, and it says the install is clean. I have tried running the exectuable directly, same behavior. I have tried creating a shortcut with the commandline option /windowed 1024 768 but it also had the same launch behavior.
I am running Windows XP SP3, 2G RAM, AMDX2-3800+, DirectX 9.0c, GeForce 9800 GTX+, Vid Driver Version 6.14.0011.8250
If there is any additional debugging information you need (if there are any command-line flags for verbose mode), let me know.