Update:
After many days of troubleshooting, it was the new acre2 mod causing issues.
I finally discovered, with the help of Flavin, that ACRE2 related stuff was the last thing being initialized every time the game was being launched.
So, with that said, we (for the second time) deleted acre2 stuff from my pc, but i ensured there was absolutely no residual files left behind upon deletion (ie appdata folder files, etc).
We reinstalled the file, and launched the game. It successfully loaded.
Thanks to everyone who put up with my bullshit trying to help!