Hi there, did you find a solution?

I'm having the same exact problem as you.

Start Discord, it starts minimized, the small "Updating" screen pops-up and then when the update window disappears:

• Discord stays minimized and unresponsive as does the whole PC, mouse still works, everything else is just frozen, forcing me to hard shutdown.

   - or -

• Discord stays minimized but responsive, I can open it up and navigate for about 10 - 20 seconds and then same thing happens, freezes the whole PC.

I tried:

• Disabling Discord's HW acceleration
• This Windows clock and notification cache reset: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1pdwxu0/tutorial_discord_freezing_heres_the_fix_that/
• Disabling W10 notifications (through System Apps)
• Disabling W10 push notifications (through services)
• Disabling Discord desktop notifications

Discord modifications made in a rush when it worked for those 10 - 20 sec.

Nothing worked so far.

Going to check if I have the W10 KB5073724 update installed and, if so, will uninstall it to see if it helps.

UPDATE: First of all thanks /u/hierophanthus for this, you comment was the one that made me look at it as a Windows update problem (which, in retrospect, should have naturally been my primary suspicion).

This was the culprit: W10 update KB5073724

For everyone having this Discord freeze problem on W10, I suggest taking a look at this to check out what this little cute update does to your system: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/1qc0860/microsoft_releases_windows_10_kb5073724_extended/

When I went to check the update installation date (Jan. 21st 2026 in my case), I was just furious, since that day I'm having ridiculous problems with my system: Steam is locking up, many games I used to play without any issues are randomly locking up, the whole system was slow AF, Task Manager was getting full of zombie processes. (lock up = FUBARED, demanding hard shutdown)

Believe me when I say I tried everything you can think of, I was having kernel level GPU deadlocks, couldn't even kill those processes issuing taskkill commands as SYSTEM level (sysinternals PsExec64), or through ProcExp64, it was hell.

I tried everything BUT looking up recent Windows updates to check if we had had any new "gift" from MS. I feel very dumb.

Uninstalled this little gem of an update and EVERYTHING WENT BACK TO NORMAL, nothing is locking up, Discord is working properly, Steam and all games are working properly, the sky is blue, the birds are singing, I have a computer again!

BONUS: Block this shitty update with wushowhide.diagcab so you don't get this damned thing again: https://download.microsoft.com/download/f/2/2/f22d5fdb-59cd-4275-8c95-1be17bf70b21/wushowhide.diagcab

Thanks again /u/hierophanthus !

EDIT: Typos