If VBP isn't able to initialize the builder component, it won't be able to display license information, since it retrieves the information from it. Apparently, the second time creating works, but I have no idea why it doesn't work the first time on that particular machine. The symptoms suggest that something is sometimes interfering with the normal COM creation logic.
Please ZIP and send to
support@kinook.com:
1) The info from Help | About | Install Info
2) A screen shot of System properties (Windows+Break)
3) The RegMon log (filtered on visbuild) for starting VBP and showing the About dialog
Since it does work from a scheduled task, another option might be to create a task, then right-click and Run the task to manually start VBP.