Did you know that if you happen to leave a disk in your disk drive... like a movie disk you forgot about... that Kontakt 5 will take FOREVER to load? I've made coffee, dinner, and cleaned my studio several times, waiting...and fuming...
 
I've uninstalled X3, rolled back, uninstalled Kontakt, reinstalled, updated, rolled back... I've had a huge pile of frustration....for days...then finally googled around on the NI forums (yes, I forgot to do that.... dum dum de dum...) and voila!
 
someone mentioned this... removed the disk... and everything is back to normal...
 
What a friggin stupid glitch... what a waste of time... what a dummy I am not to have goooooooogggggllllled immediately! (I do love the goog...)
 
I thought of posting how horrible X3 is and how it's all the BAKERS fault for putting out a product that would do this to me....but I couldn't do that to the new love of my life...

Yipes!
 
Good to see that you're taking it all in stride, though. There is something with Windows and some applications that manage to wake up all the drives in a system - even if it's not necessary. The problem is, optical drives take a moment (or five) to spin up, and if this is happening again and again...well, you know the story.
 

Native Instruments really need to clear up their install routine, it's like you have to intervene about 30 times during the installation, and for no reason. Once it's installing those packages it should just leave you alone until finished... anyway.... moan ... moan ... moan....

Sometimes a VERY frustrating problem can be the littlest, stupidist thing...
 
A stupid thing happened to me too:
I heard about the problems, when you try to drag and drop audio files from your file explorer to the track view.
It only works when you disable "run as administrator". I tried some other things like compatibility modes and clicked  " Windows 8" (I'm using Windows 8.1).
 
I forgot to disable the compatibility mode again and the effect was, that the GUI was slowly, I had sometimes dropouts and it took 4 times longer to load a project.
 
So I updated my graphic drivers, switched off some hdds and updated my bios...a day research...
 
Unfortunately I never checked the compatibility mode
A small check mark with a big impact.
 
Now everything is OK and I learned again: never touch a running system...