Distant Worlds Universe Crashes

[wludwig1962]

I recently purchased and installed Distant Worlds Universe via Steam. On my laptop, the game attempts to start and then crashes. I see where it is trying to create a couple of the smaller windows/buttons from the beginning of the game. I have followed the troubleshooting posted to the Steam site. No luck. On my computer at home (similarly configured machine), I installed DX9 and it started fine first try. Below is the configuration for each machine.
Laptop:
Intel I7-11800H@2.30GHZ
NVIDA GeForce RTX 3070 (GPU)/Intel UHD Graphics
16 GB RAM
Windows 10

Home:
AMD Ryzen 5600
MSI 3060 TI (GPU)
16 GB Ram
Windows 10

[rjord2021]

In the folder for Distant Worlds Universe, edit the file Startup.ini

Go to the last line and change it to
playmovie 0