Thanks gitsum, but I actually use several of "those extra functions" with VLC. In fact there are a couple of things VLC can't do that I wish it could do, not that I do anything fancy that would require a serious video editing app.
As a possible solution to my problem, I'm going to try at least a couple of alternate players. Since you mention Audacious I'll take a look at it. The reason I've been using VLC over the years is simply a matter of it being the most common open-source player, but as I said I've also grown fond of some of its extra functions. I've even installed VLC for people on Windows 10 machines because sometimes the proprietary players that come preinstalled are terrible. For that matter, I've installed LibreOffice on many Windows 10 machines because of the ridiculous pricing and licensing for Office.
Yet another alternate solution is to revert back to LL 4.8 on my laptops. It wouldn't be the first time I've decided to revert to an earlier release to fix a problem. Reverting to 4.8 would also reduce my boot time by 30 seconds. But I don't like going backwards.
Yet another approach is to dig in a little deeper. For example, I could attempt to identify the process(es) that are running when VLC is running. When it gets stuck I could look to see if any of those processes are running, which might give me (or an expert) a clue.
Realistically, if I'm the only person that has noticed this problem, I can't expect it to get attention from an expert. :-)