So far, so good. Installed, rebooted, SSC loaded and appeared briefly on task bar before disappearing. Version reads 2.40.03.
It's going to be nice not having to close that little box anymore.
Interesting thing is, I also used DCupdater hoping to catch latest version to solve original issue since I was running SSC v. 2.37.03. But DCupdater showed 2.37.01! Now it correctly shows I'm running 2.40.03.
Anyway, thanks for the fix and I'll post further results on this thread should this same issue develop.