Thank you terrance I got it working after doing something similar. I did a complete clean install and turned off the cloud syncing of saves that I previously had that were modded. Thank you for your response.
Thank you I found a fix. The save I deleted got redownloaded because it was synced to the game's cloud. Just had to turn that off in steam and it works fine now.
I'm having the same issue as the OP and tried deleting the file. It would try to start from steam, then it got the "- Running" and immediately went away. I verified the game integrity found, 4 missing files, and then it continued to crash after hammer. Thank you for your time.