Taylor, I can't commit to the Launcher_5_5 branch, although I'm not sure we want to try to commit my changes to trunk first since there's already development there and I'd likely be missing files from the project file.
Sorry about that; it should have the correct permissions now.
If you mean the Launcher in trunk, then yeah, I don't really know what to do about that one yet. It still won't build as far as I know, and even if it does there is still too much missing from it to actually work properly. I don't really feel comfortable porting my changes there until I can actually test them to see if it all actually works. I assume that you are in the same position. I think that we should probably just keep with the 5_5 stable branch for now, and then port anything back to trunk if that time comes (ie. if we haven't officially dropped it for wxLauncher).
@Spoon: What FSO binary did you use before this one? What is the contents of your data/cmdline_fso.cfg file?
Also, make sure that you have an up-to-date OpenAL installed, or just re-install it. The new stuff requires working enumeration support and I seem to remember there being an issue with that in certain older OpenAL versions. Although, I can't actually recall whether what OS that was for, so it may be something else entirely. I do know for certain that there was a strange crash bug on Windows with certain OpenAL versions when I originally started playing around with better initialization code in the old Xt builds however.