Paragon Hard Disk Manager 16 Basic fails to start up

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 16 (freshly installed) when started immediately (i.e. before showing any GUI or such) fails with an error popup stating:

"A part of Paragon System Utilities has stopped working.
A problem caused the program to stop workig correctly..."

This is on a Windows 7 Enterprise laptop (x64 / Lenovo P50 / 32GB RAM / ample disk space left).

Googling for the above message suggested that an (over-)active AV might be interfering, but even with AV (McAfee) disabled the same error shows up.

How can I get this working? The purpose of the exercise is to create a bootable 1:1 recovery disk of the built-in HD.