start screen freezing

The initial game loads fine, and the start screen works as it should until i try to do anything. Clicking or pressing buttons on the keyboard causes clicking intially, before they stop working, and a few seconds later the screen freezes entirely.
Task manager shows that once that happens there is a brief moment of reading from the disk before it stops. memory usage hovers around 3000 MB (though it drops by a significant amount after a while), CPU usage hovers around 1%, and disk reading stays around 0.1MB/s when it isnt 0.
There weren’t any updates since last night when i last played afaik, and i didn’t make any settings changes or anything, so idk what changed.
edit: a windows restart seemed to have fixed this