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Hi folks! I wanted to report a bug I encountered yesterday and found my fix for. Upon launching any of the three programs, they would get stuck with just the splash screen saying "Initializing..." until the following message appeared: Naturally, this was confusing, as all Affinity programs were working just fine the day before when I'd updated them, and I've never touched my firewall settings! My setup and required details: Computer Specs OS: Windows 11 Home, version 22H2, OS Build 22621.3007 Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-9300H CPU @ 2.40GHz RAM: 16.0 GB System type: 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor Using all three programs, Photo, Designer, and Publisher Using the latest release versions (2.3.1) Yes, I reproduced it, and found the issue + workaround (see below) What I tried (without success): Restarting my PC Uninstalling and re-installing all Affinity Products Once with the MSIX installer and "app" Once with the EXE installer and "programs" Adjusting and opening up my Firewall settings Today (as I post this) I have found the issue: Hidden Folders! Many programs on my PC have created folders on my PC at C:\Users\[my username] that start with a dot; as I understand it, these are common with cross-platform programs and normally get hidden by Mac OSX and Linux machines, but not necessarily by Windows, and they were starting to clutter my User directory, so I marked them and the contents inside as hidden. Shortly after, my problem above began. As soon as I un-hid the folder C:\Users\[my username]\.affinity, lo and behold, the programs started right up, and when I hid the folder again, the issue returned. My other PC running a different AMD setup with Windows 11 had the exact same issue when I hid and unhid the .affinity folder. Possible cause in the program: According to a Stack Overflow page I found while looking up how to hide the folders in the first place (as well as another page with further details linked from there), it appears that if a Windows program calls CreateFile with the CREATE_ALWAYS flag but no definition for FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN, operations will fail on hidden files. While I can't speak to what the Affinity programs are doing while initializing, I imagine the issue could be this, or something similar. I hope this is helpful for others who have a similar problem, and for Affinity developers to hopefully fix the issue when it's possible to do so.