It has something to do with skins, HT/Dale, how often does the game/client check for new skins?, would it be 10 mins?
I turned off "automatically download skins", but it didn't actually make a difference (i suspect it still checks in, but doesn't download anything in this mode), however, with that setting on, and selecting a skin I did not have, clicking it to kick it's download off, I get the freeze after the skin is downloaded, and while it's moving into the skins folder, or (it's hard to time) when the cleanup happens (when the res.fth is renamed to .res and moved to skins folder)
Can anyone replicate?