Can't play the game; freezes on startup

[SadPanda]

Well I'll be damned. It worked.

Formatted my HDD, disconnected my SSD, reinstalled Windows on the HDD, installed only the Catalyst drivers, Steam, and Amnesia, and... it worked. I started adding programs, drivers, and utilities to make sure it would still work, and it did.

Now this is where it gets interesting.

I switched back to the SSD and started uninstalling programs that I suspected as being the culprit, but nothing worked. So I uninstalled EVERYTHING. Everything on the list of add/remove got removed (with the exception of this one SOB printer driver that won't go away). And it still. won't. work.

So I'm assuming that there is some driver or update lingering on my SSD system causing this.

I'm seriously considering just reinstalling my operating system and starting everything from scratch. It's not even about the game anymore at this point. I'm just determined to figure this out.

Unless you think there's an easy way to pinpoint what driver/update is causing this.