I also have sporadic problems with getting past the "Initializing user interface" portion of the splash screen on 32-bit calibre.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=259312
Killing the calibre process and relaunching usually gets it to go, though. Until the changes Kovid made to address this (hopefully
) are released, I suggest disabling the splash screen. When launching calibre in debug mode via command line (calibre-debug -g), I didn't experience the same hanging problems.