It's very troubling that your controls disappear when the 'Load Options' screen appears. At that point, no subsystems are loaded in VA, and you're just getting a simple window with checkboxes. This would indicate that either VoiceAttack's files are corrupt or the components that VoiceAttack depends on within Windows are corrupt/misconfigured.
Do you have any type of antivirus running that may be interfering somehow? Are you able to access the Windows Event Viewer app to see if there is anything of significance in there?