LE4 hangs upon startup

Please Help! I’m fairly new to this and not a PC wizkid. Couldn’t find this on the forum. I installed Cubase LE4 which came with my Tascam US-144 audio/midi interface – downloaded the driver updates for both, and began going through the getting started manual. All seemed to work well until, after a few days, about ½ way through the manual, things didn’t seem to work. Closed the program – from then on it won’t start. It hangs on: “initializing: midi device manager”. Task manager says it’s not responding. I have properly uninstalled, reinstalled with downloading the updates many times – still hangs at same place. Guessing I did something wrong – but what? Think I may have been trying to get one of the included vst instruments to work, or something like that, when it happened. SYSTEM: HP laptop i3 4G/500G win 7 home premium. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Maybe the Tascam needs a Firmware update ;