[SOLVED] Can't Launch Battlefront II on PC (Steam)
I've been playing Battlefront II fine up until the middle of last week. Now when I try to launch Battlefront II I see a black window briefly appear (for a split-second, along with my desktop rendering in a lower resolution), and minimize to the taskbar (and the resolution returns to normal). Clicking on the icon will not open it, but I do hear the audio playing for a fraction of a second. I believe this happened after a Windows update.
I've tried everything; two re-installs, reinstalling Origin, clearing caches and settings files, and the only thing that (temporarily) worked was restoring my machine to a system image from last Wednesday. Everything was fine until I did all the Windows updates again, and now it won't launch again. Odd thing was, on the second round of troubleshooting (post system image restore) I tried launching Fallen Order, which worked fine, then I closed it and then reopened Battlefront 2 and it worked fine. After a restart today it's broken again, and the open/closing of Fallen Order did not work.
Update 1: This is odd. After another restart it just launched fine. There is definitely something inconsistent going on. For additional reference, this machine was fully wiped less than a month ago.
Update 2: Broken again. Can't launch, tried multiple restarts.
Update 3 (7/23/2020): After extensive troubleshooting, I found that an old Lexar USB memory card reader (LRW400U) was triggering a USB bus error in Device Manager, so I removed it (side bar: removing it fixed an odd issue that was causing my keyboard and mouse to take about 5 additional seconds to turn on upon a computer restart). This cleared the error in Device Manager, and now Battlefront II boots normally first try, every time. I suppose it's possible that the game's anti-cheat feature was being tripped by an unrecognized USB device (?).
Update 4 (7/25/2020): Issue is back. Game still minimizes at launch. Several restarts sometimes fix it for a session, sometimes not. This is getting ridiculous.
Update 5 (7/25/2020 part II, electric boogaloo): I did some more troubleshooting using a free application called Process Explorer (it's like task manager but more detailed). I opened Process Explorer to view all the applications that are open, then I launched Battlefront II (and confirmed that the minimizing issue is still present). One by one I went through and closed a background task, and then clicked the minimized Battlefront II icon in the system tray. Eventually I closed Cisco Webex. Boom, I clicked the Battlefront II icon in the tray and it maximized. I tested this again by closing Battlefront II, launching Webex, and then launching Battlefront II again; it again minimized to the taskbar. I used process explorer to close the Webex background tasks, and I could immediately maximize Battlefront II again. So far it appears that something in the Webex application is interfering with just this game. I'll have to test this out, but I believe that if I disable Webex on startup within task manager, this issue should go away, at least until I use Webex, upon which a restart (or closing the background tasks) would be the fix.
Update 6 (7/27/2020): Confirmed Webex was the culprit, issue has not occurred since disabling Webex at startup. For those of you in the same situation, just remember to either reboot your machine or close the Webex background tasks after using Webex.