Yes, the hang is happening between the echo out of the command to run kix32.exe and the ? "@DATE @TIME,ADLogon Kixtart Started" line.
This has been established due to the echo line being present in the log file as the last entry on a failure.

I don't know why the paths have \..\ in them. The local env var is set to HERE=%0\.. where %0\ picks up the directory that the calling script is located.

I must stress that this is not my script/domain/deployment. It's just become my problem as the local IT guy. These scripts were probably written when version 4.22 was the latest and they work well on 30k computers a day but when we try to fetch and run them from a reasonably slow WAN link on a foreign DC with 2-300ms of ping there becomes a problem.

My best bet is on the network failing to download the kix32 and adlogon.kix but I wanted to know if the community had experienced anything like this before.