I feel you, I really, really do.
I had a problem that was similar to your in which my game, ironically enough Witcher 3 would crash on start up.
I have been playing Withcer 3 on this laptop for some time. Never had an issue. Then one my SSD hard drive crashed and I had to reinstall the OS to the Spindle drive that was on my PC. That went off without a hitch. I reloaded the OS tall the updates re downloaded all my games and then left it be.
My video gaming playing habit probably inst the norm. I will pick up games and play them for weeks then something else will catch my eye and I will get caught up in another video game series for moths before going back to the original game. That's what happened when I got the new PS4 slim on a Good Friday deal with Uncharted 4. I didn't touch PC gaming for months I went through all of the Uncharted series 1, 2 ,3 and 4, and then finished The Last of Us for good measure. I then had the notion to play the Mass Effects 1, and 2 were re-hashes for me I never got the ME 3 so I picked Up Mass Effect 3 for a really good deal and finished that. Although the ME was on a PC platform it wasn't played on my laptop. I played those on my desktop PC. Needless to say it was a good 6 months before I thought to pick up my laptop and game. with that for a bit.
Two weeks ago I decided it was time to go back to the Witcher 3 (W3) which I have really liked and GOG was having a really good deal on the expansion set so I downloaded the Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone expansions started up W3 just to see it crash to my desktop.
I though no problem must be an Nvidia driver issue , nope installed reinstalled deleted tried older versions nothing I did seem to help.
I tired re downloading W3 maybe the game got corrupted nope same thing I tried downloading a Steam game nope same thing. with tat game. With one exception it seemed to start then crash to the desktop I actually got some video. I tried an older game from Steam, Mafia II, to my surprise that loaded and worked fine. I found it hard to believe at this point that it was a video card issue.
So I checked the Internet gaming forums; do this try that setting, still nothing. Then one day on a Steam form for the Witcher 3 somebody brought up an issue with a second monitor causing an issue and having W3 crash to the desktop. Just unplug the 2nd monitor and yu'll be fine.
Perfect unfortunately I didn't have a second monitor hooked up I wnet into the Windows setting to see if it was detecting my TV as another monitor because sometime I would cast my desktop top to my Smart TV nope it wasn't listed. Stumped again.
2 days went by and I had all but given up until I was thinking about a recent work trip I went and, that particular trip was worth noting because I had to install an USB to VGA adapter because none of their monitors had an HDMI hookup that I use on my laptop. Could all this been caused by the USB to VGA adapter driver.
Apparently it was I uninstalled my USB to VGA adapter driver and rebooted my laptop and bingo back to playing W3 on my laptop all wrapped up snugly in my Xbox 360 wired controller, I'm not about to go wireless after your story.
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