anyone know of a fix or something? my brother spent 30 minutes trying to join me and his system kept locking up in the infinite loading screen.

Mine never loads the first map straightway so I quit the first game and then enter it again and it loads fine then, btw good game last night skate

As I stated earlier "It may help if you alt tab out and minimize the game before the next map loads, wait 30 seconds then bring up the game again, works for me anyway."
If I do this I rarely get a black screen.

This is what was recommended by players on the BF3 official forums.

I don't think that applies to me. I have i5 750@3.2GHZ, 8 GB Ram and GTX 580. It may well be a network communication error though and my firewall is causing it but I haven't had it happen in the past week or more at all and I play for a few hours every day so I think the issue is on EAs end and not mine.

It's kind of like Red Orchestra2 and no servers showing except ones I had favorited before an update from Tripwire caused the no servers issue. Many people have that issue in RO2 and we were told it is our routers that were the issue. But I didn't buy it and one day I came across a post about it on the Steam forums and the fix was simple and had nothing to do with my router. All I had to do to fix this issue was delete ClientRegistry.blob and one other file (can't remember the name of it now). The issue all along was Steam itself and not my router. And this issue with BF3 is an EA issue and not my PC. If it is my PC why have I had no such issues for about a week but prior to that I was getting it frequently?

my system hasnt had this problem yet.. but my brother gets it way too much.

I think it may be network/router related. Not getting the data quick enough on occasion.

Then why if you minimize the game it loads the new map? Works for me 100% Suck, but there is a major problem somewhere.

It didn't work for me when I tried it but maybe I am not minimizing it at the right point. You minimize before you see the stats or after? I tried it after stats loaded because I want to see the stats.

yes, minimize after the stats. Make sure you manually minimize it to the taskbar. I have noticed that sometime when I alt/tab, the game automatically minimizes to taskbar but in this case the next map may not load. (I think the game is just "hiding" behind the browser)
Usually the game first minimizes to a small window which I then minimize to the taskbar.
Good luck.

i just press the "Start" button and go on facebook or something then go back after the round starts. (i hate TDM, Starting then it spawns someone right behind me with their muzzle against my head.)