Possible fix for GUI freezing on Windows after a crash:
I started an in depth investigation and used Sysinternals Procmon.exe for this. I wanted to know which files or registry keys the client processes and one folder came to my attention.
Nice! Thank you very much for looking deeply into this; it looks like the inter-process-communication doo-hickey bitcoin uses to handle bitcoin: URLs was left behind when you blue-screened, and that's making startup fail the next time around.
I started an in depth investigation and used Sysinternals Procmon.exe for this. I wanted to know which files or registry keys the client processes and one folder came to my attention.