I have downlaoded the recent version 1.991and encountered certain issues, which are apparently not limited to me.
I have not tried the versions 1.99 or lower for quite some time, (the last one I used was about 2-3 years ago, back then it worked without any issues).

Whenever I try to use the Vanguard.exe the game loads, I am shown the advancement bar, it fills up, the screen for the game turns black and my task manager shows me that a few seconds afterwards the game becomes inactive.
I tried to solve the issue in several ways, including disabling my anti-virus, re-downloading the game and extracting the game again and again.
Thus far these attempts have not lead to any noteworthy advance.
Afterwards I tried to issolate the error, I found out that the issue has to lie within the sprite folder, to make sure this is the case I deleted images from it and replaced certain ones to find the one at fault, apparently the     BackgroundMenu.png    data is the one, which does not lead to a missing image (the one data left in the folder, not encountering any further issues than with all images in the folder).

However I am unsure how I should proceed in my attempt to fix the issue, I would be grateful if anyone could try to help me with this issue.