Thanks for your support. The issue was resolved after I disabled my NVIDIA graphics card and used Intel. I use the HP Envy M7 which has Intel and NVIDIA and I believe the game was reading my NVIDIA card rather than the Intel one.
So apparently this problem has been around for years, but I have never seen anyone post that they have found a solution. When attempting to launch Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, nothing happens other than it appearing as a background process in Windows Taskmanager. I have tried launching from the Dev exe and the exe, with no luck. I attempted "the purge" as shown on the troubleshooting page, which did not work either. I even went so far as to update my drivers as much as I could, with no