The startup gets stuck at the VST Scan phase. I put the /NOVSTGROVEL command with a space after the quote as instructured but the program still scans for VST and gets stuck
It takes some detective work to find the offender. Move all the VST <.dll> files to a non-search folder, move a few back at a time (alphabetically for instance), launch SF until it hangs. Then narrow it down to ID the culprit.
Good luck and welcome to the Sound Forge users forum