I updated elemental to Beta 1a but the game hanged on the load screen.
Just to be safe, I uninstalled Elemental and deleted the "Documents\My Games\Elemental" folder (required one reboot) and re-insatlled the game.
On start up, the fresh install did a crash to desktop (CTD) on the loading screen (not the the pixelated splash screen). Here is my debug.err http://pastebin.com/m73c17591.
The second time around, the game booted up fine. Maybe it was really, rally missing those C:\Users\user_name\Documents\My Games\Elemental\*\*.xml files 