Had a good night's sleep - thank you, but unfortunately, so far my suggestions haven't got anywhere for your apps problem.
Should it be a driver thing, can you go into Device Manager/View/Show hidden devices and right click on all items in System devices and select Update driver.
You could also check to see if there are any updates for your graphics and audio drivers.
For the most part that will probably return that you already have the latest driver, but there may be one or two that will update.
If there are, see if that has any effect on the apps problem.