100% agree with you, the steps to resolve this without Dev involvement are far and above what should be expected of the playerbase. I just wanted to put this out there for folks who have the time/ability to do it. Even though Microsoft "officially" discontinued the Free Upgrade back in 2016, they still offer the service for free if you have 7. Takes about an hour or so (not including reinstalling D2) depending on how much you have on your machine. Just a friendly FYI to all.

Would need a new hdd first and I guess a new copy of windows

I'm not sure what your personal situation is, but the upgrade preserves your files and settings without having to wipe the existing HDD.

Oh really? I've not seen that feature before, been like 7 years since I installed an OS

If you did a fresh install, it would wipe everything for sure. But doing the Upgrade really is just an upgrade. Never do anything without backing your data up, but after running the Upgrade, I still had nearly all my programs intact, and all of my files were preserved. The Upgrade process tries to keep your "current state" as close to what you already have as possible. All my desktop icons and files were in the places I expected them to be, and I didn't have to reinstall anything (again, that's gonna vary from person to person depending on what you have). I only reinstalled Destiny because I wanted to make sure it was going to run on a clean fresh install of that.