Clearly something is preventing rfactor from getting past the player profile screen. Determining what this is will be a process of elimination.
The most common source of not getting past the player profile screen is antivirus/firewall software. Make sure you add rfactor to your AV ignore list (see its documentation for details) and your firewall allowed list. Failing that, try disabling it (but try adding rfactor to the list first since some AV's/FW's still block this process even when disabled). Failing that, I'd try uninstalling your AV then try running rfactor and see if the AV is in fact the source of the issue (this will at least eliminate it as the source).
As noted in the rfactor readme.chm, some software may prevent rfactor from running properly. In particular, VET antivirus may cause the startup process to seem like it is locked up or doing nothing (you can try waiting a long time to see if it eventually allows rfactor to get past that point). I don't know what updates for VET have been released or if VET has resolved this issue, but if not you may have to uninstall it to stop it from interfering with rfactor. There have been other software programs noted for preventing rfactor from running correctly, but I don't remember all of them now (I think npad was one of them but I don't remember what effect it had on rfactor exactly). So you might try running a more basic system startup using msconfig and see which software may be causing an issue.
Another possibility is that rfactor can't write to the player file for some reason. Make sure rfactor has the access rights it requires and that there are no hard drive issues (try running Windows check disk... see "Check your hard disk for errors" in your Windows help section).
Make sure you aren't running under emulation (on a Mac, or emulating anything with daemon tools for example).
Without knowing your system specs and what security (and other) software you have installed, it's hard to provide specific advice on what to check.
