[SOLVED] program freezes and spawns zombies

[Cube_]

I didn't either.
but after deliberating on it - that doesn't actually answer all the concerns.

when debugging there were never additional processes spawned - yet it didn't work.
well whatever the underlying reason for it not working if the AV can scan that dir doesn't really matter - what matters is that it works now.
I'll probably just have to add a note that Avast Antivirus is known to cause the game not to run under certain [unknown] circumstances.