I am beyond confused. After all this troubleshooting and trying to fix this issue. I decided to run a system optimizer in my antivirus BitDefender, cleaned disk and registry. Restarted comp after and the game started up perfectly (20+ hours of tinkering and all I had to do was press one optimizer button /cry). Appears to be some error with registry, but absolutely no clue how to pinpoint what the issue was. Either way, thank you to all to helped troubleshoot. Game is back up and running!