MSPaint and Adobe photoshop stopped working sometime between a few days ago and today.
They would show up in the task manager, but no windows would pop. and no icon on the task bar. The problem persisted through reboots. No other software I use on the regular seemed to be affected.
Virus scan came back negative.
I Ran an sfc/scannow, which found some issues, but correcting them did not fix the problem.
Uninstalled and reinstalled MSPaint, did not fix the problem.
Checked my GFX drivers to see if a recent video driver might be the issue: No new drivers since June last year. (I got an update notification a couple of days ago, and thought I'd ignored it because I was busy...but with this problem I feared I might have clicked "install" instead)
Said "fuck it" opened system configuration and disabled a bunch of services that I've had on my machine for long time (Razer software for controlling all the buttons on my old gaming mouse, Bonjour, Samsung USB drivers etc) which have not changed at all in months and/or years. Nothing remotely related to Paint or Photoshop (seemingly). Decided I'd try the easy cruft first and then continue digging if that didn't help.
Well I'll be fucked. One of those was the issue. I'm wondering if one of the anti-cheats updated something in their detection algorithms that was the issue? No matter. I don't do multiplayer games, and everything I disabled was cruft anyway. I guess I'll never know.
For the record, these are what I disabled:
Nothing appears to be obviously related.