Okay:
I just got of the phone with Zac, who spent over an hour helping me with this. We uninstalled, we-reinstalled, we deleted OCX files and let VisiLogic re-install. We did this with the newest version and previous version of VisiLogic. We cleaned and rebooted and re-downloaded, always running things after copying them from downloads to the desktop and running as administrator.
This was working on my computer (ie, I'm the local admin/owner/etc of the machine), and I have admin privilege on the machine. This is Windows 10, with all the latest updates from Windows.
Photo attached-- This error seems to show up regardless of what we end up doing when images are involved. The rest of the software appears to work: I can do Ladder, and download to the HMI, and edit things. I just can't do anything with images or animated buttons. Maybe I'll find other things that crash the program while it's working.
After chatting with Zac, I'm going to start a ticket via the email submission system and see if this works out. In the meantime, I'm going to take out my trusty Windows 7 PC, and try installing VisiLogic there, and let you know where we get on that if it doesn't install easily.