Plex Media Player for Windows freezes for 30 seconds upon launch, app unresponsive

Plex Players Desktop Players
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Server Version#: 1.32.5.7210, Docker on Unraid 6.12.2
Player Version#: 1.72.2.3901-b7911c36, on Windows 11, installed via Microsoft Store

Ryzen 3700X, Radeon 6700 XT (latest drivers), 32Gb of RAM, NVMe drive with ample free storage.

Upon every launch of the Plex Media Player for Windows it freezes instantly with a black screen for 20-30s and Windows shows it as “not responding” during this time.

After this excruciatingly long freeze, it works as expected and with, at most, minor scaling issues due to my dual-monitor setup (1080p@144Hz and 1440p@144Hz).

This is an ongoing issue and has affected many previous versions of server, client, Windows OS and GPU drivers.

Absolutely all other clients (Android, Android TV, Web) connected to this server are working fine and show no such behavior, this is isolated to the Windows client. It may have started around the time I changed servers, but I’m not clear on this connection.

Several un- and reinstalls including deleting all related appdata I could find did not resolve the issue.

1 Like
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I’ve been dealing with this for weeks and, of course, an hour after finally getting annoyed enough to write a support request for it, I figured it out:

Due to the server move, there were still a bunch of network drives mapped to now usually inaccessible shares (since the old server is mostly shut down now). That’s also why this started happening not right after the transition to the new server but only a while later, when the old server was eventually shut down.

Turns out that for some mind-boggling reason, Plex Media Player on Windows attempts to access these network drives upon every single launch and completely freezes for 5-10s for each one that it can’t access!

That pretty much only leaves me with these questions:

Why on earth would PMP do that?
Do you intend to change this?

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i did the same thing and migrated to a new server. how did you fix it?

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Remove any inactive/offline network drive.

Why this dumb bug still exists and nobody cares to fix or simply recognize it is beyond me. That should be a trivial fix. There’s no need for the Plex client to scan and pause for network drives upon launch, yet that’s what it does every time.

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