For some reason the launcher decided to work after I restarted my computer, and made sure it was running as admin, and in compatibility mode for windows 7 then I launched the game, and waited for about ten minutes, it then launched perfrectly fine. For some reason my compatibility settings did not apply. And, to answer your last question, the launcher automatically updated to 5.002, and would not update to 5.003, so I had to download the update .zip file, and install it manually.