I'm able to start the game once, after which it will run normally without issues. However, usually after starting it once or twice, it will develop some sort of issue and refuse to start. If it happens once, it will continue until I reboot my PC.

The game is technically "started" by the launcher, but hangs after printing the console message "Starting minecraft client <version>." It remains in the task manager, consuming 1.6 Mb of memory but 0% of the CPU. It doesn't even initialize the main Minecraft window.

Reproduction:

I am unsure how to consistently reproduce this issue. It appears to occur randomly. It affects all Minecraft versions. Any attempt to circumvent it (e.g. by starting the .jar directly from the command prompt) will have the same result once it occurs.