I recently installed Kodi K17 on my Win 7 system and couldn’t get it to start correctly without first going to a White Screen with the ‘not responding’ message and a choice to either close or wait. Selecting wait then resulted in a Black Screen. If I used Alt – Tab I could switch to the desktop then back to Kodi and find it was running and I was now at the Home Screen.
Same install on a couple of other Win10 systems had no problems.
I checked the other posts regarding similar problems but suggested solutions made no difference
I then checked the logs and noticed similar warnings and errors in all machines but one thing I noticed was that Aero was disabled on the Win 7 machine. I then recalled that I had adjusted the Visual Effects, under the Performance Options, to custom settings. As soon as I set this back to letting Windows manage the options Kodi started up first time and is still doing so.
This may not work for everyone but did for me.