Pixinsight 'hangs' on Splash Screen

[Skipper Billy]

I am experiencing a frustrating problem with Pixinsight since the most recent major update.

When I launch the programme it hangs at the splash screen for 60 seconds. Message at bottom of splash screen = Creating Component Windows. All other programmes start normally.

After that it runs properly.

Latest version of Pixinsight - Windows 10 Pro (fully up to date with Windows updates) - i5 machine with 16mb RAM and an SSD. I have the programme installed on an identical machine in the observatory and Pixinsight starts up in about 3 seconds.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled the programme - just the same.

Any ideas ??

[Juan Conejero]

This cannot be reproduced on any supported platform under normal working conditions. This is a machine-specific issue.

Check your computer for faulty/poor virus protection software, malwares, or utility applications running as background processes. Also make sure you are always running the latest version of PixInsight (currently 1.8.6.1457) with all available updates installed.

[Renan]

Same problem in my PC, in my notebook and in my NUC.
I talked to a friend and he says he is having the same problem.
AV installed and up to date, programs running in the background in a minimum, nothing special, W10 latest version, same for PI, disk defraged, etc, etc,  and this did not happened until the last or the one before last PI version.

[Renan]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that this happens only with the first start of PI.
If I do not turn off the PC, a second PI start is fast.

[Juan Conejero]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that this happens only with the first start of PI.
If I do not turn off the PC, a second PI start is fast.

This clearly denotes a disk access bottleneck issue, probably being caused by a combination of real-time virus scanning and poor disk access performance. These problems are inherent to Windows.

Anyway, we cannot reproduce these issues on our working and testing Windows 10 machines. It is true that startup times are quite longer on Windows than on Linux, FreeBSD and macOS, where the application launches very quickly. But never to the point of being an actual problem. Check your virus protection software configuration and consider excluding the PixInsight application folder from real-time scanning tasks. This should alleviate the problem somewhat.