New M2TW launcher a problem?

So here's the deal.
My front room TV blew up a couple of weeks ago, so I bought one of these new fangled LCD contraptions to replace my old but nice CRT. My graphics card failed a couple of days later. Great start to the week. :thumbsdown:

Anyways, as I was fitting the replacement card I had the idea of putting my PC through the new TV and getting a cordless keyboard and mouse so I could relax on my settee and play M2TW on a nice big screen. So this is what I did, moved my PC upstairs to my front room and hooked it up to the TV. I'll move the router in a few days time when I can be bothered.

All running fine, got the screen res sorted out and am loving it UNTIL I start M2TW. I first noticed something was wrong after hitting PLAY on the launcher screen, the music that accompanies the launcher screen doesn't stop but carries on as the game is loading and even once the game is at the main menu. Strange. Then after a few seconds, the game freezes. The cursor moves OK but the game itself is doing nothing.

So I spend much time reinstalling drivers, wondering if the higher res/warm weather is causing problems to my overclocked GPU/CPU and generally messing about. I eventually notice that after the game freezing for a minute or two, I get a few seconds of the PC reacting albeit slowly to commands and manage to hit ctr/alt/delete and view the performance tab. The CPU is at 100%!!
A few minutes later I manage to get the processes tab to respond and notice that LAUNCHER.EXE is still running and using 99% of my resources!!
After rebooting, I enter the game using the CD rather than the launcher and the game is running beautifully. Now... the only difference is that my PC is not connected to the internet atm, so what is the score?
As well as being unbelievably frustrated, I'm now a little worried as to what the new launcher does. It seems that it will make the game unplayable if it cannot run home to daddy via the internet.
I'm on my wifes PC atm that doesn't have M2TW installed, but over to you guys. Anyone want to check this out?

EDIT: even after exiting the game, the PC was unusable until I rebooted it. This worries me a little, what is this launcher up to? Hogging every last bit of my PC resources just because I'm not connected to the net when I run it. Bug or worse? Or just my PC being "individual"?

Yeah, it's an issue that I've seen before, but have yet to find the cause of.

You can avoid it by editing your m2tw shortcut from '...launcher.exe' to '...medieval2.exe', thus bypassing the launcher.

I will certainly be avoiding the launcher from now on, even when the PC is hooked up to the router again until someone can prove to me that something isn't amiss here.