I am having the same Issue as well, but it is not as easy to solve with antivirus and firewall being shut off. I only use Windows firewall and Microsoft Security Essentials, I have disabled the firewall and also included it in the exceptions for all products of ffxiv(ffboot/ffgame/fflogin). I too am unable to get it to launch unless I restart my pc due to "Timed out while waiting for Final Fantasy XIV to shut down" at least it is launching for now, when I do that. I run a very lean system with no more than 25 processes running on bootup. with ffxiv, that is 26 processes...

I don't keep unecessary junk on my system as I use it only for work and ffxi/ffxiv. It seems like some kind of error relating to how you last shut down ffxiv. admittedly, I've only once got it to shut down correctly. It seems typical that square would include some random check to see if the game was exited properly. how retarded. however I find it interesting that after playing I shut down this system overnight, and boot it up in the day for work, then try to launch ffxiv after work and get this error in which im forced to restart before launching. Is it some sort of super short timeout between the updater->ffxivlogin launching that when your system builds some paging from running all day it doesn't access it fast enough until a reboot is done? if so, that is also retarded.