Extremely long Cubase loading times

I installed the Cubase 12 demo and whenever I launch it, I thought it wouldnt load at all.
Today I let it load for a very long time and as it turns out, it works but it just needs 60 minutes to open up…
The steps that take very very long are “Initialising vstconnect.dll” and “VST Connect.vst3” (not sure about the exact name on the second one, Im not gonna wait 20 more minutes to see that again).
Is there something I can do that avoids removing all my vst2 and vst3 plugins?
If I remember correctly there also is a popup somewhere in middle telling me POS crashed.

I already tried reinstalling ALL the Steinberg products, including download and activation manager etc.
Help would be really appreciated since Im a plugin developer and I have to test a bug reported by some of my customers.

EDIT: I was so desperate that I did it again, here is the error
image

there’s another thread that might be related?

kind of, I managed to disable all the vst connect stuff without opening Cubase again by removing

  • CUBASEINSTALLDIR/vstconnect.dll
  • CUBASEINSTALLDIR/Components/vstconnect.dll
  • CUBASEINSTALLDIR/VST Connect.vst3