Stuck on launcher logo screen ("Final Fantasy XIV Online" with black background)

Hi all. This just happened today, seemingly out of nowhere. When I open the launcher (default SE launcher, not Steam), it shows the black FF logo screen, but does not move on to the login screen. It just gets stuck on the black logo screen.

Everything worked fine last night. I don't know what has suddenly caused this. The only two things that come to mind are that Leviathan crashed a couple of times last night, but I was able to get back in and play normally until I logged out later.

And I also installed Proton VPN a couple of days ago, but I don't actually have that turned on, so I don't see how that could affect it. Plus, FFXIV was working fine yesterday even when I had Proton VPN installed (but not turned on).

Even now I don't even have the program running at all, so I doubt that's the issue. I've tried searching for this, and it seems like a common problem, but all the fixes seem old, like changing Internet Explorer settings, when I don't even have IE installed!

Please help! Thanks!

Edit: The only other thing I can add is that upon opening the launcher, after it shows the logo screen for maybe half a second, it flashes quickly to a white screen and then goes back to the black logo screen. It's too fast to see if that white screen is anything, but what it appears to be doing is opening normally and going to the login screen, but then it reverts back to the black logo screen. Not sure if that helps.

the last couple times I've encountered black screen/logo freeze issues when starting the launcher it was fixed by editing the FFXIV_BOOT.cfg file located at
c:\users\<username>\Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\FFXIV_BOOT.cfg

make a backup of the file and then open it in a text editor.

Look for the following lines in the file;

BrowserType 0
.
.
.
WebView2RuntimeInvalid 1

the values shown here are the ones that I have in my file which is currently working.

If the values in your file are different try changing them one at a time, save the file and try starting the launcher.

Also, I should mention that I'm using the Windows launcher in Lutris/WINE on a Linux system (works great!!). I tried to edit the above information to fit a Windows system but i haven't used Windows since 8 came out.

I hope this helps. Good luck

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