The program completely closes after reaching 100% on the loading screen. This began Thursday morning.

Linux Mint, reinstall did nothing.

Did you try running the game from a terminal to see if there's any error messages that show up?

Fatal Error: couldn't open window

Setting up signal handlers...done.
archive returned 3
[Fri Mar 4 21:59:37 2011]
FXInfo: Error opening 'dat/effects.dat'.
[Fri Mar 4 21:59:37 2011]
FXInfo: Error opening 'dat/materials.dat'.
[Fri Mar 4 21:59:37 2011]
FXInfo: Error opening 'dat/effectcomponents.dat'.
[Fri Mar 4 21:59:37 2011] SetVideoMode failed, line 34: m_currentvideodriverinfo=(nil), m_videodriver=(nil)
Fatal Error: Couldn't open window.

Oh, I found this too.

With the loading screen do you mean the updater? I don't think the game would show anything with that log.

It looks like the game can't load the media file and drivers.

Did you install it with sudo or fiddle with the permissions?

I don't think the updater has a "loading screen" more like a "progress bar", I mean the loading screen for the game before you log in.

I installed it by instructing the archive to install it in a folder called ~/.vendetta after setting the archive to executable file.

oh ok! I forgot how exactly the installer works. Was the updater installed in ~/bin/ and do you start the game with that?

I managed to get the same log by running the game from a different directory. I started it with ~/.vendetta/vendetta while in ~/. If you go through the updater that shouldn't be possible though.

What if you go into ~/.vendetta/ and launch ./vendetta from there?

Do you have a media.rlb in ~/.vendetta/ and do you have read permissions to it?
This is the checksum of the current version:
$ md5sum media.rlb
f4ecf34c96c97b207dda7fa639cf535b media.rlb

"Was the updater installed in ~/bin/ and do you start the game with that?"
I reinstalled the game, specifying ~/bin/, made an alias to the updater in ~/bin/ and opened the game using that and the entire thing sorted itself out.

(Thanks mr_spuck.)