I am running Windows 7 64 bit and the new wallet works like a dream! I deleted the blockchain and ran it with NO conf file and it has downloaded the entire blockchain and synced fully with no problems at all. Seems like the new developer has cracked it! Looking forward to the roll-out of the donation feature now, hopefully done as well as this fix was.

To those getting a C++ error, try downloading the latest redistributable package and see if that fixes it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2019667