POE1: Game freeze on load / transition screen (frozen gears)

Several of my characters are in a situation where whenever i try to log in with them, the game freezes. In addition, when i do actually get some of them to load, the game will sometimes freeze when they transition to a new zone.

Seems to be worse for some characters than others, but all my seasonal ssf characters have experienced it to some level.

I can't tell if it's due to mtx / gfx things - updated my graphics drivers to most recent just in case, but it still happens.

seems to have started happening intermittently about 3 or 4 days ago, but now it's constant.

fun note: was just trying to switch from SSF Seasonal to Standard and it crashed trying to load my character list. Also, can confirm it does happen with standard characters also.


Right now the game is almost unplayable.


windows thread analyzer says that there are 2 deadlocked threads in POE. [Best guess from a former programmer: i think something's crashing out or dropping on the server side when loading character info and the client side gets locked into a loos - probably due to a bad / missing / corrupted response from the server.]

Windows 11 Pro
Steam version of POE (all files verified for integrity)
Gaming laptop: ASUS ROG Strix Scar 16
Intel Core i9-13980HX
GeForce RTX 4080 (Laptop version)
32GB DDR5 RAM

Bumping this because it STILL is happening.

Every hour or so of play i get locked out for like 10 minutes. Tried deleting the cache in AppData/Roaming - sometimes that seems to help, but often it doesn't.

every other game i own plays with no problem, so i'm pretty sure it's not my gfx driver or anything.

is anyone looking into these problems?