You may need to increase the timeout from 30000 to e.g. 100000 in the knime.ini file. I'll make that change to the VM during the next update. To do that yourself add the line:
-Dequinox.statechange.timeout=100000
to the end of the knime.ini file found in C:\Program Files\KNIME\knime.ini
First startup may take a while, but subsequent launches should be faster.