UPDATE
After continuing to have problems despite the wealth of suggestions on this topic, I decided to bite the bullet and do a “fresh start.”
I need to emphasize that this will give the option to keep your personal files, but Windows will uninstall most of your applications, including Rhino along with Autodesk and Adobe products, which you will need to manually install. However, a cool feature I noticed is it will (at least for me) generate a list of all of the applications it uninstalled and even has links to some of the places where you can reinstall them.
Anyways, the conclusion of this, after reinstalling Rhino, was that I have been able to complete the same tasks that were causing my system to freeze prior to this Windows “fresh start,” and I can now use Rhino and even the same files as before and experience none of the problems.
Windows Settings > Windows Security > Device Performance & Health > Fresh Start > Additional Info
At this point it will ask if you want to get started, and then you have the choice of wiping everything, or wiping programs but keeping your personal files. Definitely still do a backup of anything you may worry about losing prior to doing this. As I said, once it is finished, edits to the registry
I hope this helps if anyone else runs into this really niche-seeming problem.