I finally got around to updating tonight, downloaded the installer for Windows 32 from the official site, and when I ran it I got a “not a valid Win32 application error.” I double checked to make sure I downloaded the 32 bit version, even downloaded a second time to be safe, and got the same error. Then I tried it with the zip download.
I did a google search and it only turned up the issue for older versions, which ran fine for me, and a bug report regarding the issue on XP that was marked as resolved (from what I gathered while reading it it was a build issue that was allegedly corrected).
Previously when I had this issue I just had to install a VC++ redistributable runtime, but after installing (and repairing when it gave me the option) every one from 2008 to 2013 I still got the error.
Has anyone else run into this issue? And is there any way to fix it short of uninstalling, going to a previous version, and doing without cycles baking and the Freestyle improvements?