Stephen, Thanks for the monthly behind the screen and the aircraft reviews, I always look forward to them!
With your litany of New Years issues just after an annual cleaning, my first thought was “hardware,” so glad you figured out that part.
FWIW, I’ve been running XP12 through the latest release on a GTX1070 and i7-7700, and as long as I don’t overclock the GPU I haven’t had any problems with Vulkan device loss errors. I don’t always run the latest NVIDIA driver either. I am currently on several versions back, which has been stable, and unless I start running into a new issue I probably won’t update the video driver for a while as just updating the driver never seems to improve anything visually on my system, it just increases the chance of breaking something.
I run mid-range XP graphics settings locked at 30FPS with only a few basic add on/plugins, default scenery and I can’t do 4K, so it’s not as pretty as some of the screen shots I see posted. But, it’s smooth, looks “good”, and flys well…all I can hope for with my investment. Point being, a relatively low-end (these days) almost 6-year old system can work with XP12 if you aren’t an expecting to push the settings to the high end across the board and reach MSFS visual nirvana that so many posters want to tell us about…;-)