Late to the party, but same-same. Tried setting cores and threads to half what the CPU supports (4 cores and 8 threads) with no luck. It's still about a minute-thirty to two minutes after exiting before the "Play" option arrives and I can actually close the launcher.

I'm having the same problem. It's not constant, but I'd say 90% of the time it freezes for a few minutes before it's able to be closed.

ZOS, this problem still going unresolved is unacceptable. This silence is beyond absurd, JUST PLEASE AT LEAST AKNOWLEDGE THIS ALREADY! I'm done giving money to this game and company if something like this can't even be fixed or at least aknowledged. The customer service/support from ZOS is some of the worst I have ever seen.

Keep this up and I'll take my wallet and business elsewhere. WoW Midnight comes out in 2026, the housing actually looks really good there. Maybe Blizzard will get me back after years of not playing since ZOS clearly doesn't want to do their jobs!

For several months now I have had a long launcher closing time of about 4-8 seconds, but yesterday I finally encountered the complete freeze that my friends have been already experiencing for months. For now I just close the launcher right after starting the game as they suggested to me.

For a long time the launcher used to to tell me the game had crashed although I closed it regularly. For about three months now, the launcher gets stuck instead. Win 10 and Win 11, admin rights or not. I would suspect an anti cheat measure in the launcher monitoring the game, but the game runs fine when you alt-tab out of the login screen and close the launcher.

My workaround: starting the game with a batch file that kills the launcher task after a minute
(when there's an update, I just close the command prompt window)

@echo off
start .\Launcher\Bethesda.net_Launcher.exe
timeout 60
taskkill /f /im Bethesda.net_Launcher.exe

A little update to this, but yes this is indeed still happening to me occasionally. I do have sometimes where it actually doesnt freeze and finally closes normally. One thing i do notice is if you wait a bit it will sometimes unfreeze.

Justosay wrote: »

It's freezing but not forever. At least for me. Just wait a little (switch to what you need else and return later to launcher to close it). Possibly server needs time to backup your data or something similar.

Problem is I quite literally can't. No matter what I have to wait for a popup box asking me if I want to force close it. Letting it sit there just leads to the same thing eventually. It's not a natural shutdown, but Windows culling the process.

As long as it stays in its hung up state, I also cannot use Steam as each other game's page won't load until the ESO launcher is closed. I can access other game's pages .2 seconds BEFORE the X/greyout issue, but once it happens I'm forced to endure it or spam it. Happens every single time I close the game without fail and while it only lasts 20-30 seconds, its annoying.

The launcher shouldn't be doing anything to synch our data with the server and this is a new-ish issue. This shouldn't be happening.

Has there even been so much as a mere acknowledgement of the issue after all this time? Wild.