The developers will have to deal with this, but here is all the information they'll need, that (ahem) no one provided:
Also, I believe this is resulting when someone is trying to startup VLC with a default interface/skin other than wxWidgets and that maybe the method described below isn't the right way to do this (but I don't know, I'm checking now).
I figured out what it is when this happened to me.
When you go to preferences and set skins2 as the interface that is opened by default when you open vlc or select a media file which then invokes vlc to play it, the player has an error and crashes.
It is preferences-->interface-->general--> [checked box] general interface (which then inserts "skins2" into the text box below) that causes this error, for some reason. The skin for this then appears to be the apple-style skin. I do know that when you select this it says it's "launched in the background" but I don't know exactly what it means by that.) Anyways, that's the bug, or maybe people are just reading it wrong. Thanks for posting the solution at
viewtopic.php?t=11422&highlight=startup+error as a temporary fix; (it's what helped me). : )
[info needed: Win XP pro (newly installed-again!!!, sigh), intel pentium 4 extreme edition, radion 9700, don't remember the sound card name but it's a good one, VLC version 8.2, crashed when starting the player in the above circumstance, I CAN always reproduce the crash-I checked if I could, was just opening music, or just starting the player.