OK, I found the problem. Anyone having a similar problem should try this:
I did a search on c: drive for msvcrt.dll and found a few of them in a couple windows system folders – no problem with those. The other one I found was in an installed VST audio plugin (a freebie suite called VPP effects or something) Since Premiere Pro now supports VST plugins, launching PPro would load the vst plugins first and then try to load Adobe’s custom msvcrt.dll for Premiere after. The problem was that a msvcrt.dll was already loaded into memory from the vst plugin, thus creating the conflict. Got rid of that plugin and it loads correctly now.
– Derek