I never had ANY loading issues at all in ~two years of playing this game off an on, until suddenly yesterday I now freeze the moment my ball comes to a rest after my tee shot on #1.
I've tried it probably 8-9 times now on 3-4 different courses and have gotten the same result. In fact, right now I'm trying to finish the free multi-round open but have been stuck in the 10th tee box for 10 minutes now with my club still over my head after having knocked my tee shot 286 yards down the middle of the fairway.
The only thing I've noticed that's different is that since yesterday afternoon I've gotten some sort of error message when I first load the course. I didn't write it down, but it was more or less a failure to load some sort of banner and asked me if I wanted to retry or not. I clicked yes 15-20 times but the message always pops right back up. When I click no, the game loads normally and goes off without a hitch until after I hit my first shot, when it freezes at the loading screen and does nothing.
Edit: The error message is "Error #2032: assets/ads/proshop_banner.png
Retry load?"