The problem is most likely that your graphics card can't load that particular file, that it is simply too large.

A workaround for this is as follows:

1) Download http://m8y.org/hw/Data.zip
2) Go to your Hedgewars installation folder, find the Data subdirectory.
3) As a user with permissions to write to that folder, go to one directory above that Data folder and unzip Data.zip. This should overwrite all the Splash files with an empty image.

If you are still having trouble after this, try enabling the Reduce Quality setting in Options.

Note. For everyone else, this is just a zip full of empty pngs, and won't actually help performance. Also, the issue has been fixed for the next version.

BTW, I'm slowly coming to the realisation that some people are running into this because they are running opengl in software mode.
Check:
C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\.hedgewars\debug0.txt (or whatever your user directory is)
If you see something like:
0: OpenGL-- Renderer: GDI Generic
0: |----- Vendor: microsoft corporation
0: |----- Version: 1.1.0
0: \----- GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE: 1024

You're running in software mode.
Try finding updated drivers for your graphics card.
http://niuki.net/2010/03/drivers-for-gma500-with-opengl-support/
for example...

The game will run a lot faster.