Hey thanks for popping back in here, I'm still lost on how to find the plugin uninstallers, other than just deleting the dll files, so I haven't advanced on that yet.In the case of the OP, yes, it was the plugin.
I don't mind if someone else who's having the same issue wants to join the discussion, any advice or similar problems are helpful to hear (for me anyway). From that comment I learned about "Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling" which hadn't been mentioned. Siloing off conversations makes it harder to learn new things.