Acer tablet dock issue

I'm not sure this is the right place for this so please move it if it should be in a different part of the forum.

I'm working on my wife's Acer Sw3-013 (Switch 10E)(why do they give them 2 names?) with Win10 32 bit.

If I connect the tablet to the dock and turn it on it stalls at the Acer screen (no "throbber" - I looked it up and that's the name for the circle of dots that indicates a computer is doing something). It will sit like that for an hour if I let it.
If I turn it off, lift the tablet off of the dock and re-start it seems to boot normally.

This one also has the issue where it won't recognize the dock unless you put the right side on first and slowly sit it on so that the contacts touch one at a time.



I re-installed Windows a while ago and it made no difference and it sat for a few months until I could get back to it so I let it update overnight hoping it would find a newer driver for something and fix things (no luck but it needed to update anyway).



I'm thinking these problems are related and I'm leaning toward a driver issue but I'm open to suggestions.

Hey I'm having the same issues!
wanted to share this workaround with the tape:
Acer Switch 10e Keyboard Dock Problem WORKAROUND EASY - YouTube
Note that it did not solve the boot issue. i still need to boot the device without the dock connected

That video is where I learned about putting the tablet on the dock right side first. I experimented a bit with covering the contacts with tape like he recommended and it seemed to work at first. At one point it was almost working normally if I blocked the leftmost 2 terminals in the connector; I re-booted it successfully while docked with those pins blocked and it started normally and the keyboard & touchpad worked AND if I lifted the tablet off the dock and sat it back on (straight down) it connected and everything worked. I was even contemplating opening it up and cutting the connections to those terminals.

But windows seemed to have some issues so I decided to reset it and after that blocking either 1 or 2 of the terminals made no difference AND I started getting notifications "Please eject the device using the Safely Remove Hardware function in the system tray before disconnecting", sometimes just once but up to 17 times in a row after either docking or un-docking the tablet. I figured out that those messages were coming from the Acer Quick Access app so I turned off notifications from it (probably because it expects there to be a HDD in the dock that needs to be ejected properly but the HDD is disconnected in this one).

I'm still thinking this sounds like a driver issue but now I'm wondering if something in one of the Acer apps could be causing it. I don't have any Acer specific apps on my SW1-011 and it doesn't seem to miss them so I'm thinking about uninstalling all of that stuff.

What do you think?
I've already uninstalled the McAfee Virus that came with the Acer package...