I totally missed that post, thanks for your help.

I think I finally found the culprit, it's the ASUS GPU tweak utility, for some reason it's clashing with mmc.exe and causing it to close:

Faulting application name: mmc.exe, version:...

So I re-downloaded the KB460319, it took a while to download, then it asked me to reboot my pc to complete the install which I did. Then I logged in, ran both dsim /online /cleaup-image...

I'm experiencing a weird issue with that patch; it installs successfully, but I noticed when opening event viewer, device manager, or disk management, these programs close silently after 2-3 seconds...

I have exactly the same symtoms as the OP, and I have tried multiple geforce drivers and the symptoms keep coming back randomly. Sometimes my PC will run fine for 2 weeks straight, but the graphics...