No. It stays on, Windows stays out of test mode, and there's no watermark on your desktop. Add an antivirus exclusion for the loader folder so it doesn't get quarantined halfway through installing.
No, and that's on purpose. If the loader closes the instant you open it with no window at all, you're in a VM — that's the refusal, not a crash.
Your licence checks a set of machine identifiers rather than one hash, so a new GPU, a new network card or a moved drive is fine and you keep playing. Replacing the motherboard and the system disk together is a different machine and it will be refused. If that happens to you for a legitimate reason, open a thread on the forum.
No. It locks to the first machine that signs in. Licences that move between people get revoked.
No. Press LAUNCH once and start the game whenever. Raids aren't separate processes, so it survives dying and extracting without being loaded again.
Assume it's broken until you hear otherwise. The loader refuses to run against offsets it hasn't checked, which means waiting — that's the trade you want, even when it's annoying.
Not after delivery. You can't hand software back. That's why the requirements and the one-machine rule are on the store page before you pay.
The forum. Announcements and patch notes go there too.