Have not been able to start
launcher 1.5.3 appears to work fine
Click on play and get crash report
Environment
OS: Windows Vista (ver 6.0, arch x86)
Java: 1.7.0_55 (by Oracle Corporation)
Launcher: Minecraft Launcher 1.5.3 (bootstrap 5)
Minecraft: 1.8 (updated Tue Sep 02 03:24:35 CDT 2014)
Fixed for a future version. MC-70338