Thanks for posting this. Same problem, and was just starting to get annoyed, though I was getting in about 1/3 of the time, so wasn't killing me yet.
Also quad core here.
This is a big one that's needs addressing. For me it's pretty consistently about 3 seconds into click to continue... was considering turning off cloud saving as an idea as well, but
I made exception for 8.1 windows defender, and it's started working normally for the time being, so haven't been able to test windowed mode or affinity workarounds yet, but will if anything changes.
Again thanks for posting.
