Update! My solution to: "Timeout waiting for window to load. Please try to restart the launcher."

vox_doskias · January 19

For the sake of posterity, in case anyone else comes across this in the future: after a literal week of back and forth with support (no shade to them, they're trying to help!), what worked for me is this - when you manually extract setup.exe in your Zenimax Online folder, in addition to the launcher folder it also gives you a directx folder. I went in there, clicked on DXSETUP.exe, installed whatever version of directx was in there and... now the game works. It just works!

Original post below:

So, I submitted a ticket for this issue on Friday, the 16th. It's a holiday weekend in the States, though, so it's possible that staffing is low for support folk, so I was hoping maybe someone here might have experience with the same issue that might be able to help in the meantime.

I own ESO through Steam and I've been unable to launch it on my Windows 11 machine. On a clean install, when I press the big Play button in Steam, a window pops up that shows it's extracting or installing something, gets to 100%, and then disappears. For about 30-40 seconds, nothing else happens until a new window comes up that says "Timeout waiting for window to load. Please try to restart the launcher."

Please believe me when I tell you I've done plenty of searching to try to fix this problem myself. I've tried every method I could find online. Uninstalling and reinstalling the game, restarting steam, restarting my PC, directly extract setup.exe with 7-Zip and trying to launch again, all with the same result. One suggestion online was, after extracting setup.exe, go into the newly-created launcher folder and run Betheseda.net_Launcher.exe directly from there. That DOES open the launcher (sometimes), where it downloads 100 gigs of data, and it allows me to launch the game. When I log in with my account details, it tells me that if I bought the game through Steam (which I did) I should launch it through Steam. And then the window hangs when I try to close it, forcing me to use the Task Manager to close it. I also used the Repair function in the launcher, but that had no visible impact. Most often, though, clicking Bethesda.net_Launcher.exe will result in the same error message referenced above. I've downloaded a zip file with the launcher folder in it (no idea if it's actually different in any way) and all of the same things are happening.

On the morning of the 18th, a member of support reached out and asked me to generate a report from msinfo32 and send it to them. I have, and haven't heard anything back since.

My PC exceeds the minimum and recommended specs. Windows and my graphics card drivers are all up to date.

Bearing in mind all of the stuff I've already tried, does anyone else have any experience that might help? For that matter, do you know what they might be looking for in msinfo32.txt?

freespirit · January 19

I don't run via Steam so cannot help there.

A quick search for info on msinfo32.txt and what it does, suggests they might be looking to see exactly what hardware, drivers etc your system runs.

You can search it yourself and see the results, basic co-pilot told me this......

"msinfo32.txt is a file generated by the Microsoft System Information (Msinfo32.exe) tool, which is part of the Windows operating system. This tool collects and displays detailed information about your computer's hardware, software, and system components."

vox_doskias · January 22

Somehow I managed to fix it myself, so I've updated the text and title of my original post in the hopes it will help someone else in the future.