Weirdly, you can hit alt+f4 and close the modal popup (or whatever process spawned it), and the client more or less works or lets you set settings and navigate. It's just shaded due to the popup being spawned earlier.
I have not yet found what precisely is causing the erroring or crashing yet, but it seems like a minor showstopper. Hopefully EA can resolve this soon.
I'll update again if I find anything; client logs seem most appropriate, or looking closer at what I just alt+f4'ed.
Update, like 15 minutes later:
Well that's weird - after 100% reproducing this just by reopening the app (either via the app itself, or after killing all the EA Desktop processes), I can't reproduce the issue now. It just works.
The only thing I did was update my AdGuard filters and had the filtering log open, in case some essential communications with some server was being blocked, and to delete my log files in `%LOCALAPPDATA%\Electronic Arts\EA Desktop\Logs`. The purpose of that move was to just so I can review the logging with a clean state (albeit, with EA Desktop launching/logging in with cached credentials), and immediately into an errored state.
Well, upon relaunching, it just worked. The logs do have some errors, but they pertain to certs and one error 403 loading some remote resource. All seems fine in the client now.
I doubt I did anything to actually resolve it, but if you really had to try any takeaways from my post, it's to disable system-wide or network ad/privacy blockers temporarily (or at least update your filters), flush your DNS cache (`ipconfig /flushdns` in command-line). And check your log files for hints. You can try deleting/clearing them out, if you really want to replicate my steps, but I seriously doubt these things changed anything, heh.
Does it work for some of you right now? If you haven't changed anything, and it works, then it would indeed imply it's server-sided. And not loading some remote resource isn't handled gracefully.
Final Edit:
Did a good old reboot just to be sure. No issues so far. I think the claims about it needing to run as admin at least once holds more water. Event logs say that EABackgroundService is what failed each time, and not quite the EA Desktop app (hence you can alt+f4 the error popup). I think when I relaunched the app after killing all its processes, it launched with admin elevation, and resolved itself. UAC is not disabled in my case, but it auto-elevates for my user's requests in my setup. Taking a guess, maybe the installer, after finishing the installation process, launches it differently, causing this error loop.