Exceptionally slow loading and startup crash in paradox launcher, Stellaris and Cities: Skylines

[Kivi-]

Hello!

I am posting here because after installing Stellaris, and launching from steam, I cannot play on a fresh install (no mods!) the paradox launcher starts very slow, hitting play makes it not respond and launch the game very slow, which will not load, it just doesn't respond. After this I went back to play Cities: Skylines which worked perfectly beforehand, but now exhibits the exact same issues, here I have a few mods installed, but like I said worked before, and it does the exact same thing, paradox launcher takes ages to start, and the game won't really start loading, just black screen. Both games fail very predictably, both use 0% cpu and 0% disk when they get stuck, and 184mb of memory every time, both games. This leads me to suspect that this is an issue with the paradox launcher not the games themselves. I have validated the integrity of files with steam for both games, this went unusually slow, and found some files that failed, steam redownloaded them but the exact same issue persists.

Edit:
Also, forgot to mention, I tried uninstalling stellaris, but I was unable to, steam reported that an unexpected error occurred while uninstalling the game.

Anybody has any troubleshooting ideas?
Thanks!

Kivi-

 

[AndrewT]

Not a forum problem, so moved appropriately.

 

[AndrewT]

I suspect you have multiple problems there, including perhaps a Steam issue.

To test your theory of the launcher being the cause, run stellaris.exe directly from File Explorer. If that has a problem it is not the launcher at fault for that issue.

What launcher version do you see? Current is 2021.6

 

[Kivi-]

You are correct, this is not a launcher issue but a windows issue, after digging around with resource monitor and process explorer I have found that the cause of the extremely slow loading, is the 'System' process, which bombards the SSD with a huge volume of IO when starting the game, and according to resource monitor, it is reading the game archives, however it is reading it very slowly, I assume with a lot of very small scattered reads because the actual effective speed is around 0.5mb/s off a fairly new SDD. I have disabled real time protection, windows defender, windows search and indexing of the drive to no avail.

I have left Cities: Skylines to load overnight, and it did load, but when I left it, it was over an hour of loading and was about 10% done. (it took 3-4 minutes before)
But trying again it is still slow, letting it load slowly did not help.

I have posted on Microsoft's forums too (it appears I can't post the link here tho)

Here is the resource monitor screenshot too:

You can see that the System process is reading far more data and from the game files than the actual game.

Thank you for the help, and sorry for posting in the wrong section.
Kivi-

 

[AndrewT]

Not an issue I've come across before I have to say!

What antivirus app do you use?

 

[Kivi-]

I do not use any antivirus other than the default installed windows defender.
Since my last post I managed to figure out the issue however, and turns out it was not a software related one, my (then 2 weeks old!) ssd was faulty, I have reformatted it and tried many things, but it's read speeds are extremely slow no matter what I do to it, so I had to conclude that it was the hardware's fault, but only some games (both my paradox games) were installed on it, so it was not trivial to isolate.
I thank you for your help and am sorry to bother you, when it turned out to be unrealted to the games.

 

[AndrewT]

Not a problem, no need to apologise! You weren't to know.

All the best!