Is Microsoft sabotaging the VLC project on purpose?

Yesterday I learned something which left in quite a bit of shock. I have noticed that it takes a considerable amount of time (like 30 seconds) for the video to start playing when I watch movies stored on my NAS from my Windows 10 gaming PC. And stupid me was really searching for any error in my network, my NAS, etc. As VLC worked fine for years. Never ever would I have suspected that Microsoft's corporate policy is likely to blame. Huh? What? Why VLC suddenly takes 30 seconds to start (and no it is NOT VLC's fault) VLC isn't one big monolithic .exe file. It's built almost entirely out of plugins for codecs, demuxers, I/O modules all loaded dynamically at runtime. After all one reason for the popularity of VLC is the vast support for any imaginable media file format. Parsing every single plugin binary on every startup would be slow, so VLC keeps an index of them in a file called plugins.dat. Read the index, load what you need, done in milliseconds. That's the theory. In practice it…