Dolphin takes a long time to start

[ABSAhmad]

Hi everyone,

since I love the metroid games but don't have a Wii anymore I decided to use Dolphin to play the trilogy.

So I downloaded it and tried to use it but just starting Dolphin without actually loading a game takes >30 seconds.

I've tried the beta, dev & stable version. All of them exhibit the same behavior.

What I already tried to fix it:

* Delete the Dolphin folder in the Documents folder
* Changing compatibility mode to Windows 7
* Starting Dolphin with admin rights

My PC specs:
* Windows 10 21H2
* CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900x 4.6GHz
* GPU: Nvidia RTX 3080 TI FE
* RAM: 32GB
* Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0, NVMe M.2

Dolphin builds I've tested (deleted the dolphin folder in Documents before each test too):
* 5.0-15993 (Beta)
* 5.0-16083 (Dev)
* 5 (Stable)

It's also a fairly recent installation of Windows 10 with only a handful if things installed at the moment.

Does anyone have any idea what else I could try to fix this?

Any hints are greatly appreciated.

[ABSAhmad]

Hey,

after a lot of trial and error the "5.0-15708" build worked for me. Then I used the update button to update to the latest version and now it's still working.

I have no idea why it fixed it, nor if it will happen again but for now it's fixed.
Even deleting "C:\Users\User\Documents\Dolphin Emulator" doesn't bring back the issue. I absolutely didn't change anything on my PC since the post.

[ABSAhmad]

Okay, since I've been having this issue again and it was driving me crazy, I decided to dig in a little bit deeper. So I checked out the source code and debugged it, the culprit is the following line: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/master/Source/Core/InputCommon/ControllerInterface/DInput/DInputJoystick.cpp#L39

I then found the following StackOverflow thread regarding this very issue: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10967795/directinput8-enumdevices-sometimes-painfully-slow/47952243.
Apparently, this is an issue with Windows in combination with some specific drivers, so I then checked out what the culprit was in my setup.

I have my PC connected to my monitor using a USB 3.0 A-B cable, so I can use the USB ports on my monitor, where I have one device plugged in.
I've disabled all of the usb ports on the monitor with the exception of the one I'm using and that apparently fixes the issue.

I still have no idea, why it worked sometimes — I didn't change anything in my setup at all. But now it hasn't re-occurred for quite some time.

Thought I'd just leave that here in case someone else runs into this issue at some point and finds this thread.