I had a friend with a strange matlab startup issue on Windows Xp sp2 and AMD. Matlab 7.0 R14, it would install and run just fine, but it used to crush just before getting into the prompt in the main windows. No useful info into logs using -logfile.
Starting with -nojit (another solution found around) would not help. This is extremely disconforting since the same installation worked in a similar computer with an Intel processor and XP sp3. This should have hinted me, but it didn’t. Luckly, I found a solution to this issue thanks to abautu.
As hinted by him, matlab R14 has issues in choosing the right libatlas in AMD system. Just adding the right environment variable BLAS_VERSION with the value atlas_Athlon.dll solves the issue:

For the original information see http://abautu.blogspot.com/search/label/matlab and http://www.mathkb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/matlab/12542/MATLAB-7-R14-crashing.