Soft lock after Windows Defender updates?

[CrowTheRobot]

Hi all,

 

My new PC has run Windows 11 since it was built (Ryzen 5 7600X, RTX 4070, 32 GB DDR5, don't remember my mobo off-hand but it's an ROG).  For a little while I was getting a lot of random game crashes, which I think ended up being video driver issues.  Eventually that morphed into BSODs that seemed focused around ntoskrnl (at which point I made the mistake of getting it stuck in a Driver Verifier loop) but an SFC scan seemed to fix it.  Now the issue I seem to be having is that my PC frequently won't wake if I leave it for an extended period, regardless of whether or not something is running.  At my last job we had a lot of issues with Fast Startup on Windows 10 (though not the same issues) so we used to use "powercfg -hibernate off" to disable it and hibernation, so I did the same here, and my power settings are set to never technically let my system sleep.  I'll come back to my system and my NZXT Kraken will say something like "CPU 35 degrees", and when I try to use my keyboard or mouse to turn the screen back on, the CPU either doesn't change or maybe spikes up 5 degrees, and the backlight on my 34" ultrawide might blink on for a few seconds, but my 27" secondary monitor does nothing, and then the backlight goes off on the main.  No matter what I do, the only way out is full forced power off and then boot fresh.  Checking Event Viewer, typically the last thing (or maybe second to last sometimes) before the messages about booting, is a "successful" install of the KB2267602 definition updates for Defender.  Any thoughts?  I've tried Google, SFC, DISM, updating from 23H2 (another separate headache from this morning that I spent 30 minutes trying to roll back because it broke UAC, shutdown/restart, and Ctrl+Alt+Del among other things) and restarting/resetting Defender.  I'm not above a fresh install of W11 (one of the upsides of having two beefy SSDs and never doing much that can't be lost) but I was hoping for an easier fix.