I've been running gnupg-w32-2.2.3_20171207.exe for about as long as it's been available and no hanging whatsoever. Thanks a lot!

Alright, I need to weight in with something that may possibly be influencing the failure of the December-01-2017 build to operate correctly over here; since this issue is related to sockets, and I have set up a rather unusual security apparatus on my system ("unusual" as far as computers regularly running GPG are concerned, and that only to my personal experience, meaning no reliable statistics or anything), I think it's worth mentioning that my firewall (Sygate Personal Firewall Pro) is configured to be very restrictive and that virtually anything that utilizes tcp or udp is being routed through socks5 via ProxyCap, and that neither application is currently allowing GPG to have access to any address but localhost (there's a reason for this and has got nothing to do with GPG itself, but that's part of a different discussion).

Ok here's an update.

Superb! Testing gnupg-2.2.3_171201.exe as I type, and it's already working past the time it would normally cease to respond :)

Well, I'd expect gpg not to alter my digest/compression preferences when changing my cipher preferences and vice versa. So if a user's going to have to lose his previously set preferences for a key in this manner because that's the only reasonably viable way of maintaining backwards compatibility, I think it would be appropriate to let him know beforehand and also suggest that he set it all up at once (as I've so described above) so that nothing is lost in the process.