I think I found a few issues I would like to report, and I did some exhaustive testing and trying, I build software so I know enough to be dangerous. 
Hopefully this can help others.
Making it work:
1st - If I installed the application as a local account, it seemed to work fine under that local account. But if I then logged into my Microsoft Account (Windows Live Account) I couldnât even use the application. It didnât have permissions for me to even run the game, although I could look in the program files folder. It would seem the installer doesnât set proper permissions for the install folder in some cases like this. (only on the HB installer)
2nd - If I installed it under my âMicrosoft Accountâ (using a Windows Live) it does have the right permissions, but the game was not working for me. If I switched back over to my local account, it didnât have any permissions to run the application like in 1 before. (only on the HB installer)
3rd - I then ran a few procmon a few times and procdump, and tracked down a lot of false positives in registries not found, and other files that were not found ⌠then I found one that said it had a name collision (and when it seemed to crash) when it was creating a file in this location âC:\Users\John\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\S-{LongGuidHere}â. Donât want to put the GUID as seeing itâs cryptography and this is the internet and my computer. But inside that folder were 3 different files. When I deleted that whole folder above (all three) then the application worked fine. Then I did some more digging and found only one of those if I deleted let the application work fine.
So two issues I found were:
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If you install the HB version as an account on a PC, only that account can run the application fine. You have to uninstall and re-install (or edit the C:\program files\ permissions) to allow the group âUsersâ the right access to run the application from that location. (note this only happens with the HB installer, Steam already has the correct right access in the Common folder, so I didnât have this issue with the Steam install, I tried / tested both in all scenarios). Note that my local account is Administrator and my Windows Live account is not. This is so I have a good separation of power and I have to type a password to do anything, so as to keep myself as secure as you can with Windows.
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If there is a file in your Crypto RS folder that this software is looking for, and itâs corrupt or something is wrong with it⌠then Stonehearth will not launch anymore. I think perhaps the code could be changed to see if the file is there, and if itâs good⌠and if not remove it and re-create it and I think you could solve everyoneâs problem with this possibly? Just an idea. Note also, I tried to rename the corrupted one to like _OLDCORUPTED at the end⌠but it still wouldnât run until I either deleted the file, or moved it to another drive (which I did in case the developer wants to see the corrupted file).
After reading on the internet, this RSA problem is a common theme in software that uses this functionality, and users have posted that they have to remove the file all the time to get that software to work. I saw posts of people having to delete the folder each time before they launch the application, but that doesnât seem to be the case here in Stonehearth, once I delete it once it runs fine after that. So I am sure there is a way around this.