OpenGL
Making your computer fit for a 3D creation tool might require different OpenGL settings than typically for 3D games. Sometimes the out-of-the-box standard installation of graphics drivers even make Blender crash immediate after start.
Blender doesn't use special platform specific or 3D card specific OpenGL commands. For the entire GUI it even still sticks to the OpenGL 1.1 standard, which is now over 8 years old and which can be expected to run fine on all modern 3d hardware. However, since Blender utilizes several 2D calls in OpenGL - not commonly used in games - it can happen that drivers are being shipped with 3D cards that don't support some 2D calls well.
There are three important things you could check;
1) Always verify the availability of new drivers, on the website of your graphics card vendor.
2) If this doesn't help, test if Blender works correctly by setting 'hardware accelleration level' of your system to zero.
3) Check the Graphics Card FAQ for further hints and tweaks
Most 3D card vendors now ship tools with their cards to to define special OpenGL settings for each application you use. These tools are commonly used to optimize speed for games, and is useful for Blender as well.
Quicktime
If you have Quicktime installed, Blender attempts to link with it on startup. Quicktime versions 6 and 7 are reported to work, but the free "Alternative Quicktime" version 7 is reported to crash Blender on startup.
Check the Crash report!
When you have a crash, the standard crash message in Windows doesn't tell much, it is important to verify information of the entire stack of calls Blender invoked. Try to get the full crash report and check in which library the crash happened. Usually you then can verify if this is in Blender, or in an OpenGL driver or Quicktime library, for example.
With Blender having the Python scripting language built-in, it is important to have a 'console' for printing debug or testing information to. The Windows OS doesn't allow this to be an optional user choice, it is a setting defined while compiling and linking software.
This is a default print from the Python library, to denote that you don't have a Python install available on your system. Blender will run perfectly without, so nothing to worry about.
We still try to get the Python library to create a more readable print...
We haven't collected enough information for this item yet. Please visit the Elysiun Python & Plugins forum to get support.