This is just an FYI for anyone who hits this problem like I did...

I just installed VCM Suite on a new machine, and the install went fine, but trying to start the Scanner resulted in an "unhandled exception" from Windows, and the program wouldn't start.

It turned out I had some older versions of .Net Framework installed (4.5.x and 4.6.x), and apparently VCM Scanner didn't like that but didn't complain directly about it -- it just crashed on startup. I installed .Net 4.8 and that fixed it.

I had the older .Net installed from MS Visual Studio and/or Office. I broke into the crashed Scanner process in the VS debugger, and saw that it only got as far as loading one of the framework DLLs (maybe mscorlib.dll? I didn't write it down). There was no stack trace shown though.

In Event Viewer the exception was reported as the following:

Application: VCM Scanner.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.
Exception Info: System.IO.FileNotFoundException
at <Module>..cctor()

Exception Info: System.TypeInitializationException

Faulting application name: VCM Scanner.exe, version: 4.10.7.0, time stamp: 0x61781799
Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.1.7601.23403, time stamp: 0x56f58523
Exception code: 0xe0434352
Fault offset: 0x0000c54f
Faulting process id: 0x4c0
Faulting application start time: 0x01d89a4cb2cb94ec
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\HP Tuners\VCM Suite\VCM Scanner.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\syswow64\KERNELBASE.dll
Report Id: f18ea0ac-063f-11ed-b152-005056c00008

Hope this helps if somebody else runs into the same problem and/or if HPT wants to put in a fix for this...