The file that got pegged as the likeliest culprit is afd.sys, which appears to be used by a wide variety of devices. A lot of the support stuff online links related crashes to outdated firmware for networking devices, and there is an update for my wireless router so I'm taking care of that right now. Windows searched and said the driver for the network adapter on the 'puter was already up to date.
I went into services.msc after a successful reboot and tried to see if the associated service for that driver is starting up and running with the OS, but I'm not sure what the name of the service would be or if there would even be one to look for. Something to do with Winsock? I dunno. Also checking out some of the services that show up as totally disabled but as far as I can tell they are all things that I don't use or need and have never enabled for that reason, stuff for SmartCard readers and people running web servers.
But I also think the reinstall is probably a good idea at this point. I have changed so many things, including tinkering with the registry, and used System Restore a couple times, and done so much stuff that I'm starting to lose track of what I did and when and whether or not I undid it (if that was even possible) after it didn't have any effect. And I've also just this evening had the computer crash (altho not to BSOD) while the game was NOT running which seems to indicate that the problem is not with the game/mod files, but something that is exacerbated by me running the game. Or else I've been running the game so much trying to recreate the problem that a crash I would have had anyway happens when it's loaded and is much worse because of that.
If I do a complete reinstall and still have problems then I might have to accept that it's hardware, but you are right that sometimes just getting in there and resetting stuff is a good idea. Altho I agree that if it were the GPU I would probably be seeing lag and/or a degradation of gfx quality somewhere, which isn't happening. Everything runs and looks great right up until the moment the whole system goes down.
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