Audacity Crashing

Ok, I will do my best to make a long story short. I have been using Audacity as my DAW since I began my voice over career (more than 2 years ago) and it has never caused me any problems. A few months back I downloaded Reaper but could not get it to work, even after I made sure I had downloaded the most up-to-date driver for my pre-amp (Tube MP Project Series). After that failed experiment I started having a problem with Audacity crashing my computer. I would be in the middle of recording and it would just freeze. Sometimes I was able to get out of it with Task Manager but more often than not I had to completely shut down my computer and restart. I did some digging on Audacity forums and discovered that Audacity “doesn’t play well with others”. Basically, if 2 different applications were both accessing the sound card Audacity would always lose and the result would be a crash. So I then went on a journey of the following steps, all of which have been unsuccessful. 1. Uninstalled Reaper and the downloaded driver for my pre-amp. 2. Uploaded latest version of Audacity (3.0.3). 3. Did a complete factory reset of my computer. 4. Downloaded the most up-to-date driver for my sound card. I am at my wits end here. If it helps, I am working on a desktop computer (HP Pavilion Desktop 590), I am running Windows 10, and if I am reading things right I am running an AMD High Definition Audio Device. I guess it might be possible I have downloaded the wrong driver for my sound card (I know just enough about computers to make a mess). Any help from anyone would be greatly appreciated (I’m going to go bald if I keep tearing my hair out).

Does your computer have plenty of space on its C:\ drive?

If you have any projects (“AUP3”) created in Audacity 3.x, now would be a good time to export as WAV files so that you have a backup.