Photoshop Elements 13 on Windows 8.1, window freezes on startup

Question

I bought Photoshop & Premiere Elements a few weeks ago to run on a new Windows 8.1 computer.  I entered the serial numbers of both programs during installation.  Premiere has been working all along.  Photoshop worked for a few days, then the window started freezing.  I have to kill it with Task Manager.  I followed the trouble shooting guide and did things like reinstalling, running in different accounts and so on.  I even reinstalled a Windows backup onto a different hard drive and did a fresh install of Photoshop and Premiere.  All the reinstalled versions of Photoshop have frozen as soon as I tried them, and Premiere has always worked.  I've also tried disabling my firewall before starting up Photoshop, and that didn't make any difference either.
I've had two Chat sessions with support and they've had remote access to my machines.  They've tried a few things like changing permissions on some files and asking me to reinstall yet again, but basically they haven't accomplished anything.
I've notice that when the Window is unresponsive, Task Manger shows that Photoshop is using a small amount of CPU.
In order to get some idea what might be going on, I've tried running Microsoft Sysinternals Process Monitor while the Window is frozen.  It appears that the Photoshop Editor process is in a loop that runs 3 or 4 times a second and makes about 13 system calls.  The stack tracebacks all include entry points in AMTValidateProductLicense in amtlib.dll.
I can't imagine why it's doing the same thing over and over instead of telling me what it's unhappy about so I can try to make it happy.  Most places I've worked would regard this sort of behavior as a bug.
I hope this is enough information for someone at Adobe to figure out what's going on.  I have a saved procmon log with all the details that's about 800K bytes.  I could send it to Adobe if it would be any help to you.
One more detail:  At the time things stopped working, I was having some problems with sharing printers & scanners that was causing anything that tried to access a printer to freeze, so I had to exit unceremoniously from several programs including Photoshop a few times.
I'm working with a new DVD purchased from Amazon for this computer.  It's been reinstalled several times on two different hard drives, but always in the same computer.
If you're unable to fix this, I'll be returning it to Amazon for a refund.  I could write my own program to open a window and then freeze if I wanted one.

Answer 1

I've got things working now.  The process I followed was:
1. Reboot in safe mode
2. Run Photoshop elements.  It worked in safe mode.
3. Unplug the network cable
4. Restart in normal mode
5. Run Photoshop elements.  It worked with the cable unplugged.
6. Exit out of Photoshop
7. Plug in the network cable
8. Now Photoshop seems to start up normally.
It seemed to me that the problem had something to do with license validation.  In safe mode there's no network connection, which might disrupt validation.  When I left out steps 3, 4 and 5, it still didn't work.  After doing that once, it seems to work.  If it stops working, I'll post another reply here.
YMMV.