There is some great information in the post “Program Freezes – virtual VM Hyper V” where I found that others are apparently experiencing the same problem I am seeing, (which it turns out has nothing to do with virtual machine implementations). An issue report was linked to this post “v5.1.5 Eeschema crashes on first opening after installation (IP# 1854593).” So there is a bug and the fix is scheduled to be released in v5.1.6. The issue is only related to the schematic editor not opening; apparently everything else works just fine.
The root of the problem has to do with graphics hardware acceleration. That feature does not work on my machine, so the software typically falls back to software rendering. The eeschema configuration file tells whether to use hardware acceleration. When starting from scratch, the eeschema file has not yet been created, so the schematic editor creates one. However, it does not first check to see if calls to your graphics driver works, it only assumes you will use hardware acceleration. The result is the system hangs up. By the way thank you again, der.ule (Ulisis), if you are reading this, for putting this information in front of me.
There is a workaround, which is to create the eeschema file manually in your user settings folder and include nothing but the line “canvas_type=2”, which must effectively must mean “use software rendering”. I’ve tried it and everything seems to work. I will also try pre 5.1.6.
I look forward to learning this system and collaborating with you all.