Aurora R10 Ryzen, Windows freezing, and the weird change that fixed all

I have had my Alienware Aurora Ryzen edition for a couple of weeks. It's been amazing for game, but buggy as hell for everything else. 

I was having to restart Windows Explorer several times a day. Every time I opened a folder and tried to open a graphics file out of the folder, I would get the spinning cursor and the window would freeze up. About 25% of the time, even opening the graphics program and trying to open the files out of the folder through the graphics program Open would freeze Windows. It would sometimes freeze on non-graphics files as well.

Some of my programs started exhibiting weird behavior. For example, my text editor TextPad always used to open .HTML files in browser on command; on this computer, it wouldn't do that. I could only open the file by selecting it out of the browser. This is just one example of many buggy behaviors various non-game programs were experiencing.

Through a series of work events, I found that I had to be able to open and convert .HEIC files to .JPG format, which meant upgrading my graphics program from Adobe Photoshop Elements 14 to 2020.

When I launched PE 2020 for the first time, I got an error that I was missing two .DLL files - msvcp110.dll and vcruntime110.dll, and would have to install them to get PE 2020 to work. Consulting the Adobe support forums, I discovered I needed to install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable to Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019 (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads), a non-standard runtime library. I downloaded and installed the x86 version.

It fixed Photoshop Elements 2020 ...

...AND EVERYTHING ELSE.

It was the magic sauce my computer was missing. Everything was working again. I could open files out of folders. No more multiple-times-a-day Windows Explorer freezes. I could open TextPad files directly into my browser again. The bugs were exterminated. Everything was acting exactly as it should be.

Had I not had the problem with the .HEIC files, I would not have ever installed this runtime library.