LaunchBox takes a really long time to launch, stalls on "Populating Games..."

[eyrie0]

I am a long time owner and user of LaunchBox and over the last (year? months?), the app has gotten incredibly slow to launch.  I'm typing this as I'm waiting for it to launch right now and it's already been 3 minutes.  It just finally finished after around 4 minutes of sitting on "Populating Games...".  Once launched, everything seems normal.

Also, while it is stalled, the "Populating Games..." window is forced to be always on top of everything else on my computer (Windows 10), which makes it even more frustrating as it's difficult to do anything else while I'm waiting for LaunchBox to start up.

I do have a large collection - 7665 total games.  Does this happen to other people with a lot of games?  Is this being worked on to fix, or is there something I can do to fix it on my end?

I am currently on version 11.18-beta-3 to fix the Epic import, but this has been happening on all stable version for a long while.

[C-Beats]

You can turn off that splash screen in the options, which would allow you to work while you wait on the start up. That being said the load time's you are experiencing are pretty significant given how small your collection is. I currently have 40k games in my set up and the start time is no where CLOSE to that long, so I do think something is going on. Do you have a lot of auto-populated playlists? Also if you don't already please turn on debug logging, then close LaunchBox and reopen and then take a look at the log, it may give us a hint about what is causing such incredibly long load times on your machine. Another thing work checking is that you don't have extra back up files in your data folder. I've seen third party apps place files in that directory (usually Skraper) and it causes issues loading data correctly and promptly as well.

[eyrie0]

I do have 5 auto-populated playlists with large numbers of games in them. I don't see any extra files in my Data folder. I've attached the log from opening the app again. There are some errors, maybe something related to the MS/Xbox imported games?

Debug 2021-09-16 09-27-32 AM.log

[C-Beats]

Do you have any files in your \\LaunchBox\Plugins folder? Seeing some calls in here I don't recognize at all.

[eyrie0]

Yes, I have written several of my own data scraper plug-ins. Let me try removing them from the folder and see if that fixes it.

[eyrie0]

That did improve things, but it still took 2 minutes 40 seconds to load.

[eyrie0]

Here's a log without auto-populated playlists or plugins.

Debug 2021-09-16 09-41-41 AM.log

[eyrie0]

Looks like the delay comes between these two lines:

2021-09-16 09:44:51 AM Unbroken.LaunchBox.Windows.Desktop.ViewModels.MainViewModel.window.Deactivated Completed
2021-09-16 09:46:15 AM Unbroken.LaunchBox.Windows.Desktop.ViewModels.MainViewModel.window.Activated Start

 

[Rlad]

Do you have any antivirus/firewall installed, i had the same issue a while back and it turned out to be Comodo.

[eyrie0]

Quote

Do you have any antivirus/firewall installed, i had the same issue a while back and it turned out to be Comodo.

Only Windows Defender.

[eyrie0]

Update on this.  I managed to find a workaround - run LaunchBox as Administrator.  There seems to be something wrong with pulling UWP apps on my machine.  I've attached two log files which show running the app as Admin and not.  When not running as Admin, I get errors like this right before a 2 minute stall:

2021-10-11 12:16:41 PM FIRST CHANCE EXCEPTION: Value does not fall within the expected range.
   at Windows.ApplicationModel.Package.get_InstalledLocation()
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Windows.Integrations.Xbox.Xbox.GetAllInstalledUwpApps()
2021-10-11 12:17:11 PM FIRST CHANCE EXCEPTION: Value does not fall within the expected range.
   at Windows.ApplicationModel.Package.get_InstalledLocation()
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Windows.Integrations.Xbox.Xbox.GetAllInstalledUwpApps()
2021-10-11 12:17:41 PM FIRST CHANCE EXCEPTION: Value does not fall within the expected range.
   at Windows.ApplicationModel.Package.get_InstalledLocation()
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Windows.Integrations.Xbox.Xbox.GetAllInstalledUwpApps()
2021-10-11 12:18:11 PM FIRST CHANCE EXCEPTION: Value does not fall within the expected range.
   at Windows.ApplicationModel.Package.get_InstalledLocation()
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Windows.Integrations.Xbox.Xbox.GetAllInstalledUwpApps()
2021-10-11 12:18:42 PM FIRST CHANCE EXCEPTION: Value does not fall within the expected range.
   at Windows.ApplicationModel.Package.get_InstalledLocation()
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Windows.Integrations.Xbox.Xbox.GetAllInstalledUwpApps()

Is there any way to disable LaunchBox from attempting to access Uwp games on my machine?

Debug 2021-10-11 12-16-10 PM_no_admin.log Debug 2021-10-11 12-20-45 PM_admin.log