It seems as if you've got a "white on white" text colors setting somewhere. (The old hidden console windows checked for that and switched to a visible display; the ConPTY windows assume you meant to do that.) Are you starting a TCC tab window (the default)? Try starting TCC from a CMD command...

TCC does not try to access the internet at startup to check the registration. However, TCC does try to validate the authenticode signature on TCC.EXE and TAKECMD.DLL, by calling WinVerifyTrust., which in turn calls Windows' certificate-chain engine. If there is a missing local intermediate/root...

Which means TCC is either running in a TCMD tab or a Windows Terminal tab.

Are you running TCC in a TCMD tab window, a Windows Terminal tab, or as a bare conhost session? Try starting TCC with the debug option (TCC /...). That will pop up message boxes showing the TCC initialization stages, and should help isolate where the delay is coming from. (If you don't see any...

So is 4DOS, but I'm not supporting either of them ...

The message is coming from Windows, not from TCC. Since TCC hasn't supported 32-bit for 10 years, I doubt this is worth trying to hack a new message into Windows.

You have ConPTY enabled, but do you have ANSI enabled? Those are ANSI escape sequences that are being displayed literally instead of interpreted as color resets.

I have uploaded 36.52.88 to the web site. Two fixes here: 1. Some fonts have bad ligature values that caused TCMD to calculate the wrong caret position and right margin. TCMD now validates the ligature values before using them. 2. OpenAI broke their APIs (again) with the 5.6 release. Four API...

That's WAD.

TCC is catching the exception, cleaning up as best it can, and continuing with the next command. It does not restart. If Windows handles the exception, you'll get a dialog asking if you want to exit or restart the app.

The next build (36.52.88, which will be uploaded today) checks the font for bad ligature values and disables them.

Console sessions don't use ligatures, so the bad values in Lucinda Console wouldn't affect them.

They are for menu, ribbon, and status bar fonts. The one for "Tab Windows" does change the font in the TCMD tab windows.

Did you change your default console palette?

SelectColors expects something like "white on black" for the text color, which would result in the highlight being inversed to black on white.