This is no longer a problem, so this thread can be closed. I followed the fix for "Crashing After Obsidian, Paradox, and Kickstarter Logos" in the common workarounds thread, which I had missed before, and it seems to have worked.
Today I finally got the chance to install PoE and was excited to start playing it. But whenever I open the game it crashes at the initial loading screen so it's completely unplayable so far. Attached is the zipped crash report folder as well as my DxDiag.txt and a screenshot of the error message. Any help is appreciated.
2015-05-11_153006.zip
DxDiag.txt