I've found out what the issue is.
It seems pulseway managed to broke all of my microsoft visual c++ instalations (all would give errors upon attempting to start them), so yes, pulseway IS interfering with 3rd party products.
As a matter of how certain I am this was caused by pulseway, well think about it like this, for the past 2+ years I haven't installed any product on my system, I only kept updating the products I had, and as soon as I installed and uninstalled pulseway these issues started surfacing.
This doesn't seem like a coincidence, so please let your developer team know that their product installation or uninstallation is breaking the following:
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x86 Redistributable
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable (x64)
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable 4.0 Refresh
Tested via various games that would require one of each of those programs, it seems I had to reinstall all of them in order to fix this.