I was only going to spend a couple of hours on my PC tonight and now it's past 11pm.

I'm now back to where I started before all this fiasco began. I installed v2, removed the [startup] from config, reinstalled 3a3, along with Hijack, emphatic, VNC.

Does the position of the [startup] section in the config.ini make a difference? I think I'm gonna risk putting it elsewhere with a smaller setting and see what happens.