QGIS hangs when VPN disconnected; searching for connections

[dpsspatial]

Describe the bug

When connections to databases and mapped shared drives are dependent on a VPN connection, and the VPN is disconnected, QGIS will hang indefinitely when the application is started up, looking for those connections, making the application unresponsive until the VPN connection is re-established.

How to Reproduce
A VPN connection will be required:

• connect to VPN
• establish connection to postgis database within VPN
• establish favourite mapped to folder within VPN
• close qgis
• disconnect vpn
• re-open qgis
• qgis will hang looking for connections

QGIS and OS versions
QGIS: 3.12.3
OS: Linux Mint 19.3

Additional context
Working from home has exposed this issue. My 'work' connections all depend on VPN, but have been doing a lot of other projects unrelated to work. QGIS would hang and hang and I couldn't figure it out until I realized it was searching for my database connections and mapped folders that were all on our work network. As soon as I started the VPN, QGIS came to life.

My workaround has been to create another profile and switch to that, but if I forgot to switch to that profile, I still have to connect to my VPN just to load QGIS then switch profiles.

[sevberg]

I have also been having this problem, although unfortunately creating a new profile does not seem to resolve it for me. Both the default and new profile directories are on my local "C:" drive so they should be resolvable even when I'm not on VPN? Nevertheless something still tries to connect to the network folders causing QGIS to freeze

QGIS and OS versions
QGIS: 3.10.8
OS: Windows 10 Pro

[Nogbit]

I ran into the same problem today with 3.10. So I upgraded to 3.16. Then when it tried to load (while not connected to VPN) it eventually popped a warning that "plugin has crashed previously and has been disabled" (it did not say which one, only using defaults). So I went to the plugins menu, and it continued to have problems and gives an unavailable for the main repository. I can load this URL just fine in a web browser.

And now 3.16 wont load either, just that one time after the install.

[openSourcerer9000]

@dpsspatial thanks for the workaround, this was driving me nuts

[Klaus-PVA]

Still an severe issue.

QGIS and OS versions
QGIS: 3.28.2
OS: Windows 10 Version 2009

My workaround is to disable the whole browser. (no new profile needed)

My suggestion is to make the browser a separate thread so the main program can be used
during the connection process.