Yesterday, while still trying to work out what issue I may have after the latest Asobo update I suddenly had lock-ups of the sim before I could get off the ground (not CTDs, lock-ups).  The main problem area appeared to be in Flight Planning - the mouse clicks weren't detected and everything just froze, OR the Flight Planning area opens but everything runs like it has a cob stuck up its butt.  The only way I was able to proceed was force-close the program thru Task Manager.  This happened twice.

The second time it happened I figured I'd reboot my system.  As I did so, Windows interrupted and said it need to finish the update.  Now, since I was not aware of any update (nor had I approved one) this surprised me.  I told the system to finish the update and restarted.  I checked Windows Update after the restart and it said a part of it had failed, so I ran it again and restarted again.  It finally said I was up-to-date.

After starting FS2020 again, I once more had a flight planner with constipation, though after a lot of very slow reacting menus I was able to actually start a flight.  Once started, everything ran normally, outside of other issues I'm experiencing after the sim update.

Has anyone else had issues with a Windows Update interfering with the sim OR have you had difficulty with flight-planning after the latest Asobo update?

In Windows Update settings you can tell the OS what are your active hours and the process will not interfere with other applications.

Or you can turn game mode on, which does the same, among other things.

Yep, I had Update set to not run at that time.  Game mode was turned on.