IntelliJ IDEA stopped working after Windows 7 Updates

(This post is only of interest to people having the same situation, probably finding this through Google search.)

Problem

After finishing the last batch of Windows 7 updates with some issues (blue screen), my computer was fine, all programs worked normally... except for one: IntelliJ IDEA just wouldn't start. I was running version 12.1.3, and upgrading to 12.1.6 would not fix it. Also, the earlier and still installed versions 11 would not work.

The process started normally, as seen here, but the application was missing:

The Windows event viewer had no message about it.

There was a thread dump in the IntelliJ IDEA log folder c:\users\my-username\.IntelliJIdea12\system\log\threadDumps-timestamp\...txt with a time of the program start, but the text within the file was not helpful to me.

Solution

What solves the problem is to right-click the program in the Windows start menu, and select "Run as administrator".

Thanks to my wife for figuring it out.