SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - Help with resolution/graphics problem

First post so go easy on me

Played sh3/gwx for over a decade

Current system is windows 10 on a year old above average laptop with hdmi tv/monitor.

1 year ago i installed steam version of game on this system with gwx and sh commander. Ran fine, display was 4:1, im not sure what the resulotion was, i might have had a resolution patch, cant remember, but it looked great. After a few months, possibly after a win10 update, the game began running in 1024x768 that was stretched to fit. I could manually adjust the monitor display to 4:1 to fix the stretch, but it was clearly 1024 resolution scaled up and looking terrible. Further the graphics looked worse than just poor resulotion, with bad or no 3d engine and what looked like a 32 bit color scheme. It looked like a game from the mid 90s. I fiddled and mucked about but was unable to restore it at the time. I could run the game in windowed mode and not have upscaled resolution, but still terrible color and rendering.

Since then i have tried a complete clean install, deleting everything and re downloading from scratch
In the following order I installed:

vanilla steam game version
gwx 3.0
thomsensoundpack 3.2
MEP v6
tkss18 compilation 1 + 2 + fixes
arb wide gui v3.1
hsie supplemnt to v16b1
tycho v3

all instructions followed precisely

all mods seem to be working however same resolution problem

after which i tried; the d3d9.dll/.cfg
adjusting my system display to all various resolutions
running sh3.exe in various compatability modes

same problem

at this stage i suspect its something to do with my system, it DID work for a few months, but im 15 years out of date with windows/computers now and am out of ideas.
the last thing i can think to do is a clean windows restore and install, but thats alot of work just to have it still not work.

Lots of thanks for any help