I have the same black screen issue with Deskscapes 8 and am not on the Insiders program. This just started happening after updating to Windows 11, version 24H2.
I've just followed the steps to purge, reboot and reinstall. Still no animation, just the black screen.
DeskScapes 11 is the current version of DeskScapes.
DeskScapes 8 is not supported on Windows 11 24H2 or in fact any Windows 11 version. DeskScapes 8 was released in 2013, DeskScapes 10 in 2019 and Windows 11 was released in 2021 and DeskScapes 11 officially in 2023 having been in beta since 2021.
Unfortunately the only fix is to update to v11 of DeskScapes (or stay on 23H2 possibly)