It seems that more often than not when I quit the game, everything seems fine, and I don’t get the "Alabama" error message (although I have gotten that a couple of times), but when I try to play again, minutes or even hours later, the game won't launch and I see that error message.

Luckily, there's an easy work-around for this: you find the game in task manager and find the avowed folder which will show 2 files stil running (forever apparently) and you can end the task there and then it will launch fine.

Also, is there a "known issues" list yet somewhere in this forum that I haven't found?

The error is still happening after the 1.2.2 update today.

If it helps, the two processes that keep running after game exit and prevent you from re-launching the game unless those tasks are ended are Avowed-WinGDK-Shipping.exe and Avowed.exe.