Skinned interface vlc hangs at "Not responding" periodically

[Cencyte]

I ran skinned interface VLC 3.21 on 4 computers running Windows 10 and 11. The computers had Intel and AMD processors. The old Compaq Presario laptop had an AMD processor, and it actually is not affected by the VLC 3.21 glitch I am about to describe. The CPUs on the other computers are intel. Here is the glitch:

Steps to recreate: (Windows 10/11)
1. Set VLC to the skinned interface and choose any skin.
2. Restart VLC to apply the change.
3. Open then close VLC and repeat this, waiting until the player window does not show up
4. (if) the player window does not appear for a little while, locate the VLC icon on the taskbar and notice it's status; It will say "Not responding".
5. Wait 1 minute.
6. Observe that the VLC window eventually opens.

Description of glitch:
The delay of the VLC window not openining is around 1 minute, and this will only happen every 5 - 10 times you try to open it,so similar to like a Roulette of sorts. [This glitch does not happen at all if the native interface is selected].
For reference, here is a list of things I've tried without luck:

• Using ProcessMonitor filtering just for VLC related messages, I discovered that there was only the message type "Process Profiling" being repeated while the VLC application hung.
• Creating a Windows 10 virtual machine in VirtualBox, then testing for the same issue (the glitch still happened in the VM).
• Checking the Problem History in the Security and Mainenance for vlc, and viewed the trace for the crash that resulted when I ended the process with Task Manager.
• Logging to a file, and looking for the part of the log that seemed to correspond with the hang that VLC was stuck in, so I could see what aspect of the startup was taking the program so long to load
• I looked online, but it seems like nobody is experiencing this kind of issue. Here are a few things that people have said they've tried, to varying success (but which didn't work for me at all):
- Disable auto subtitles
- Disable plugin scanning
- Deleting preferences
- Reinstalling
- Increased the process priority
• Completely reset one of my laptops (intel CPU) and the issue STILL persisted on a clean reinstall of Windows.
• Tried to use the nightly builds (the installers and .exe files all presented errors that terminated the installation.)
• Using different skins, all to the same effect. The native interface does not have any problems at all.

However,
There is one thing that worked:
Reverting back to VLC 2.0 solves the issue (!? ‽⸘). I don't know why, but it works. I really want to use the new features of VLC 3.0 though

Desperate to get to the bottom of this and have it fixed.

This is the error trace from problem reports for VLC, when I killed the process with Task Manager when it was not responding:

Code: Select all

Source VLC media player Summary Stopped responding and was closed Date ‎1/‎14/‎2025 11:14 PM Status Report sent Description A problem caused this program to stop interacting with Windows. Faulting Application Path: C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe Problem signature Problem Event Name: AppHangB1 Application Name: vlc.exe Application Version: 3.0.21.0 Application Timestamp: a6d0a6c0 Hang Signature: 9882 Hang Type: 67770368 OS Version: 10.0.26100.2.0.0.256.48 Locale ID: 1033 Additional Hang Signature 1: 98825ccd5d5a9dabaee829d98f2619c7 Additional Hang Signature 2: 9ec8 Additional Hang Signature 3: 9ec8457a7ca3301501851a48deb41213 Additional Hang Signature 4: 9882 Additional Hang Signature 5: 98825ccd5d5a9dabaee829d98f2619c7 Additional Hang Signature 6: 9ec8 Additional Hang Signature 7: 9ec8457a7ca3301501851a48deb41213 Extra information about the problem Bucket ID: 5bef034a3a6c53b02b214dc79ee45a14 (1954929233015101972)