You can go into your Task Manager and search for "Bethesda" in the processes and then right click and choose "End Task".
There's been a problem with ESO having something running in the background or hanging up with the launcher for a few updates now.
There was an update that caused the game to use a lot more CPU and resources, and when quitting the game, it hangs up on quitting so you can't close the launcher.
This has been reported a bunch, support tickets have been made, but nothing has been done to fix it.
Update 49 made things worse. I used to get 120 FPS consistently, now I'm lucky to get 60, it's usually around 59 FPS, and there's frame freezes. That's also been reported in the forums and tickets have been made, but nothing is being done to fix these issues. There's lots of people that have game crashes now, getting kicked from the game more frequently, etc. All that is being reported, but it seems to be ignored.
@ZOS_Kevin are any of these reports being looked into and addressed? Performance issue have been a problem for a few updates now.

MoonPile wrote: »

I've had the hang-up issue while the game is running / after closing before, but IIRC solved it by downloading a different version of the launcher from one of the threads about that. It's on the official site somewhere, not going to search for that right now.

Both of the comments above are a different issue than I'm having in the OP:

This issue is new and is now happening every time I start up my computer after sleep. It happens before the game ever runs, which is the main problem: I cannot start the game at all.

Here it is again today; first it's "loading" really slowly, take a minute or two:



Then ends up like this:



It's not just the launcher; the whole game isn't connecting. Here I'm running the client directly (I use this for my non-Steam alt account); it won't let me log in:



Force-quitting via Task Manager and restarting the launcher and/or client doesn't do anything. Same issues persist. As stated in the OP, it requires a full restart of the PC.

P.S. I was going to try repairing the game files (the launcher option) but I thought I'd read ages ago that this can mess things up if you're using Steam? Is that still the case?

Ravenshadow6513 wrote: »

You mentioned the issue happens when you start up your computer after sleep. The windows sleep feature isn't like shutting down your computer. Sleep only moves things to memory and enters a low power state. Does it still have the same issue if you completely shutdown and boot the computer back up?

I'm aware, re: sleep vs shut down. That suggestion would have the same effect as a restart, in that yes, it works after, but the issue was having to entirely restart or shut down-and-re-start at all.

But I think it's moot anyway; an update yesterday seems to have fixed it. TBD.