That was worth a try. An upgrade/repair install is a powerful tool that fixed me once. I'm glad matters got no worse. For less anxiety, make a Windows system image backup before doing anything big. Want instructions?
But I think Windows just one way or another wants modules to be loaded & ready for use even after the program that uses them is closed. It's meant to speed things up in case you open it again. And there's prefetch as well as you suspected. So, it's a feature -- & an upgrade/repair install cannot "cure" a feature.