I'm hoping there might be others experiencing this issue who can shed some light on how to (quickly, preferably) fix it or work around it.
I can open the launcher and it reaches the point where it is interactive, and it says it is "Creating Download" above the progress bar. However, it gets no further than that.
When I leave it to its own devices in hopes it will clear up and begin the download, after about 10 or 15 minutes an error box pops up that says something along the lines of "Pointer Value Null". At this point the launcher is no longer interactive, and the only thing I can do is click Okay on the error box, which closes the launcher and asks if I want to search for a solution.
I have had launcher problems in the recent past, but those were due to the fact that my launcher and game files are all located on an external hard drive, and at the time the patcher stopped searching for external devices as valid filepaths.
I will continue to troubleshoot and try various things, but at the moment, if anyone else has experienced this issue and found a workable solution for it, I would greatly appreciate your input, please! Thank you for your time.