Hi @majhi. Thanks for sharing your findings!
I did a survey of the reports of Arduino IDE hanging with this "openpgp: signature expired" message in the logs. I found that all of the reports were from users with an IDE of 2.3.0 or newer. This made me wonder if maybe an out of sync clock was the cause of some of the mysterious reports of the IDE hanging on startup without any "smoking gun" in the logs and that the difference from 2.3.0 was that the IDE is now able to communicate about the cause of the problem by logging this error.
To test this hypothesis, I deliberately put my system clock out of sync and then attempted to start Arduino IDE 2.2.1. It was able to start up without any problem. I then tried starting Arduino IDE 2.3.2 and it hung so I am confident that I produced the conditions under which the fault occurs.
So this tells me that IDE versions prior to 2.3.0 were not affected by an out of sync clock and so this could not have been the cause of reports of earlier versions of the IDE hanging on startup.
Thanks for the offer! Unfortunately although I am aware of the context around the --hostname :: fix/workaround, I don't have a good understanding of the conditions under which the hang which is fixed by it occurs. I made quite some efforts to reproduce the fault (using the unfortunately quite vague information provided in the discussion at Stuck at loading screen · Issue #12751 · eclipse-theia/theia · GitHub) at one point but was not able to do so.
I would definitely be interested to understand whether the bug has been fixed incidentally through some of the changes to Arduino IDE 2.x that were made since 2.2.0, but I would need to be able to reproduce the fault with 2.2.0 in order to determine that.
Anyway, I'm happy enough that everything is working fine for you now even without having to use that --hostname :: workaround. If you do end up learning anything more about the subject, or if you find that the problem comes back even with Arduino IDE 2.3.2, please do let me know.
Sometimes I am able to slowly gather clues from user reports that finally allows me to reach a breakthrough in understanding a previously mysterious problem. I actually had something like that with the "openpgp: signature expired" fault. I had noticed several user reports but found no good solutions after some research. Then I happened to experience the problem by chance while using a virtual machine with an out of sync clock due to not being connected to the network. That allowed me to understand the nature of the problem and also verify the solution.