Cumulus Support

Saw this both in my previous build and with the current build, 3173: there's a long delay during startup, before Cumulus has even read cumulus.ini to know anything about startup or ping delays:
Between "Current culture" and "Checking required folders" something took a minute and 26 seconds. On the previous run it took exactly one minute.

The only thing that has changed on my system is Windows installing updates as a matter of routine, followed by a reboot. Once the program gets going, all is well and all the other behaviors are seemingly normal.

Found the problem... it wasn't Cumulus as such; it was one of my external hard drives not functioning quite properly; it needed to be unplugged and replugged. Evidently at some point during startup either Cumulus or Windows wants to look at the drives on the system for whatever reason, and if a drive appears to be connected, but is not responding properly, it will hang here for a long time until whatever system call is doing this times out.

Leaving this here in case it helps someone else in the future... if it happens to you, open up your file explorer, and check to make sure you can actually access all your drives.

Between those messages Cumulus queries the Windows performance counters (on Windows anyway) - so it looks like they were getting a bit hung up with your drives state.