Cortana crashes when using search from taskbar/start menu

Asus G750JM
Windows 10 Home

As soon as I start to type in the search bar the search bar crashes preventing me from using the search function at all. With the task manager open I can see one of the cortana processes disappear and reappear - i guess indicating that Cortana is crashing. The only way i can get search to work is: when i click in the search bar from taskbar, a cortana gui pops up and I can click the type of thing I'm searching for first. If I click "apps" the type "apps:" appears in the search bar automatically and I can proceed to type after that and search for whatever I want. Interestingly, if I start to delete the "apps:" characters, Cortana will again crash and the search bar crashes. Clicking away from the search bar anywhere else on the desktop or taskbar brings the search bar back and I'm able to try again for another crash.

This is a fresh install on a new Samsung SSD. I've reinstalled Windows about 10 times in the last couple days due to a freezing issue that it seems I solved with a bios setting, given that, I'm trying to not reinstall Windows again. After some google searching I've found quite a few others who seemed to be having the same problem as me, but I've been unable to find a solution that worked.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Some more info that may or may not be helpful:

Installed windows from a bootable USB created by rufus and a W10 iso. Iso created by the official media creation tool. I need to have CSM enabled to boot from the new drive (as well as boot from the USB) whereas I can boot from the old hard disk with CSM disabled. I'm not familiar enough with uefi and bios to know why that is, but I assume its a setting I had in rufus?

All drivers are windows generic drivers except the nvidia driver. While troubleshooting the aforementioned freezing issue i found all windows drivers were exactly the same as any driver I got from Asus except nvidia (laptop is fairly old, predating W10). I have the latest nvidia driver released sometime this December.

I believe my mobo is not "officially" supported for w10, although I've never had an issue before. It came with W8.1 originally, but I upgraded to w10 immediately back then.

The only other software I'd installed before noticing the problem with the search bar:

Mozilla Firefox
Office 2016 (365 I think, I pay a monthly sub fee, downloaded from official source)
Steam
Battle.net app
Destiny 2 game

A big reason I dont want to reinstall w10 again is ive installed those things a few times along with w10 the last couple days. Destiny 2 in particular is 80+GB. It only takes about an hour to download and my data cap is decent at just under a terabyte, but I need my bandwidth and dont want to use another big chunk if I dont have to.

Thanks for the reply. I had tried both of those suggestions before to no avail. I ended up reinstalling windows again anyway and now all is well.

I downloaded a new iso and started from scratch on the USB boot drive just because of the issues I had. Everything is working perfectly at the moment.