I am terribly sorry to post a third time in reply to the thread in a row.
but i am also terribly sorry to report that i believe i fixed my issue. shortly after these issues i started having further problems with my system and i believe i found the solution. i can't be certain until i do further testing over a few days, but i was able to play the game without any issues after quitting.
I was kind of worried so i didn't apply my fixes one at a time to find out which one actually fixed my issue but i did three things:
- repaired my corsair driver install (including CUE) [for some reason i started having issues with this program in conjunction with my graphics drivers]
- i was already running the newest version of my nvidia graphics drivers, so i went into the custom installer and had it do a clean reinstall
- i updated my windows to the absolute latest version, the October creators update. this could have done two different things: either effectively reinstalled my OS (since it is a large update of core systems), or just fixed some parts that weren't working with my drivers.
I don't know why this game caused the issues to become visible, but i am sorry to say that this may have been an issue with my system that the game only made apparent.
at this point this thread is probably of little use, as this may have just been all my systems fault.