Poked at the logs myself a bit more and noticed this is occurring right after the Discord hook .dll loads (or tries to).
Discovered Discord itself was completely wedged, killed it, restarted and it threw errors trying to self-update. Reinstalled from web and everything is happy now.

Update after ...

Upgraded from 0.18 to 1.0.0 -- now get crash on start during/after Crop Bitmaps.
No mods.