Startup process of the Packaging PowerBench seems to hang

If you operate the Packaging PowerBench in an environment that is isolated from the Internet, a relatively long time (about 30 seconds) may pass between the start of the application and the application window showing up.

The reason for this behavior is that the product PPB is a digitally signed application on the Microsoft .NET Framework. 

When loading the executable, the .NET Framework tries to check whether the certificate used to sign the application is still valid. To do this, it tries to load the so called Certificate Revocation List of the certificate issuer. The Certificate is issued by the Certification Authority "GlobalSign" (https://www.globalsign.com) and therefore the attempt is made to access the URL http://crl.globalsign.com/gscodesignsha2g3.crl, which of course is not possible in an environment without access to the Internet. Depending on the configuration of the environment a timeout may occur.

To speed up the startup process, you can change the line 17 in the configuration file PackagingPowerBench.exe.config

<generatePublisherEvidence enabled="false"/>

which is commented out by default, by removing the <!-- mark at the beginning of the line and the --> at the end of the line. After you have saved the file, the startup process of the PPB user interface should now proceed quickly.