Well, oddly and embarassingly enough, a simple restart of my computer seems to have fixed the problem. for now? Upon restart windows was doing all kinds of disk checks and deleting a bunch of files and other stuff, I didn't catch it all.

I'm still going to do a clean install though, I don't have full faith in it and I wouldn't doubt if I continued playing I'd end up getting errors down the road.


I guess this thread can be closed now. Sorry for wasting anyone's time who actually read this.