same topic in the US forum, several people are afflicted right now.
for me, the problem started right after this thing happened from AVG.
Don’t know if they are related or not.
I’ve been experiencing this issue very consistently for a long time but suddenly ever since the expansion patch it appears it went away. Launch process now very rarely stalls, but for no longer than 30 seconds.
I don’t believe it has anything to do with antivirus or virus infections. Reinstalling and redownloading files never seemed to fix anything.
Sometimes the game wouldn’t launch at all, other time it would list itself as a background process under task manager and if I was really unlucky, repeat attempts at starting the game would cause multiple instances to launch at the same time, some 10 minutes later when I don’t even expect it.