time for a reinstall

Right right, driver hunting is a pain in windows 7, I will never go back because of that issue. I do like win 10 despite its privacy issues, and other issues it has because its trimmed way way down because of windows 8 RT. It is highly optimized far more than 7. 7 would be good for businesses or something who just need something reasonably fast and rock steady, as windows 7 is very stable.
I loved windows 7 when it came out and used it for a long time, I remember when a lot of people hated windows 8, but I arrived on the platform a little after 8.1 and I loved it. I never use the universal apps though, that's just asking for nightmares, but it runs so smooth, and windows 10 has kept with that theme of being fast. Also, you pretty much never have to worry about drivers unless you're a gamer playing mainstream games in which case you'll use your GPU's software to get the latest ones, but you do sometimes have to roll back because they screw stuff up and it may make some games unplayable, or have weird graphical glitches. The casual user never has to worry about that, and its got that user experience thing going on. Most things you plug nito windows 10 will installdrivers. That being said, if you get into android, be prepared to fight with it because it will always want to install over your work and you need those ADB and Fastboot drivers in tact. In fact, it might even be worth it to create a talking arch VM and use it just for android stuff because it comes with ADB and fastboot support without you having to install it, at least ubuntu does, arch might not, but its probably in the repo, if for some reason its not, it'll for sure be in the AUR.

Hi Aaron.
I have windows 7 and I think I've had a problem similar to yours. Windows explorer seems to crash sometimes for no reason at all. I don't think NVDA is the problem though. Anyway, what I usually do is restart my computer by pressing windows, then pressing right arrow twice and up arrow twice. This will put you directly on the restart button and you can press enter and it should work fine once it restarts. Another thing, don't have windows explorer open with an internet browser running at the same time, this seems to cause problems as well.
Hth.

You could always try running a scan with malwarebytes. I've also seen mcafee stinger recommended as a one-time scan solution, but have never used it. If driver hunting is a massive issue, I have used a program called snappy driver installer, it's an open source driver updating tool. The interface is not accessible, but you can run it unattended. Only downside is that I've only got it to work by downloading the entire driver database, which is about 12 gb. Also, it doesn't work with incremental files, so when you want to keep the driver database updated you need to download 12 gb of data each time. That said, I've thrown a lot of systems at it and it always managed to get everything up and running, audio, graphics, network. It also has printer drivers, so if it isn't some obscure braille printer or something, it should get it running. THe only way you can see what it is doing is by using ocr on the window.
hints for unattended driver installs:
in the last line of sdi.cfg (generated when running the program for the first time are switches. In my sdi.cfg the switches enabled are:
-showdrpnames2 -checkupdates
you first need to download the driver database (on the old system, you can't download drivers without a network card driver)! what you do is add -autoupdate to the switches:
-showdrpnames2 -checkupdates -autoupdate
use ocr to get the download progress
when you want to install drivers automatically use the -autoinstall switch:
-showdrpnames2 -checkupdates -autoinstall
there are also ways of automatically rebooting the system after driver installation is finnished, but I have never used them.
be careful, just because this worked for me does not automatically mean it works for everyone.

I would recommend against any and all McAfee products as they're inaccessible, and even their uninstaller was, it is doable now that NVDA has the built in OCR thing, but its not intuitive. I just uninstalled all McAfee products from this Dell laptop I bought yesterday so I know it can be done.

This is one of those obscure things you could spend the next month fighting with and you may get there, who knows, maybe not. I've had these types of things happen, though not this issue specifically. I would begin to pull all your data off the drive that you want to keep, and do a reinstall. Either get yourself a USB flash drive, or if you have a laptop as well, another solution is to get an SD card and a USB card reader, because most assuredly, the laptop would have a card reader in it, my Toshiba from 2006 had one, and all the laptops I've owned ever since have as well, so I'm sure its standard issue now.