Borderlands 2 crashing on startup

Solution 1:

After nearly giving up, I found the answer on Gearbox's forums.

From the post:

• Delete Borderlands 2 in Documents/My Games (not WillowEngine.ini)
• Stop cloud storage in Borderlands 2 Steam properties
• Verify cache in properties
• Activate the nologo option :
• Launch the game and turn off automatic detection in launcher's config (put all options in off or lowest possible)
• If the game start, it will create a new profile.bin... Quit the game and put your saves (not the corrupted profile) in the correct folder. Restart the game.

It does seem that this causes the well known issue that causes badass rank to get reset, however. The Gearbox forum post listed above provides information on how to manipulate it using Cheat Engine, but I'm personally going to wait and hope for them to release a fix that recalculates it automatically.