There are a couple of reasons I can think of. Probably the most common one is that in Windows it’s likely you have to run the program as Administrator. Specifically, right click the program name and choose ‘Run as Administrator’.
I can’t guarantee that this solves the hanging problem 100%. But on the firmware updater page scroll to the middle and you will find an alternative updater, which is written in Qt and it’s likely to work for all Windows platforms.
You can access OpenSprinkler without having Internet connection — that requires you to use the OpenSprinkler mobile app (or OpenSprinkler browser plug-ins). The reason is that rendering the UI requires Javascripts which normally are obtained from the OpenSprinkler server, but the mobile app and browser plug-ins have these Javascripts embedded.