Turning off Hardware Acceleration is not something you do to your OS nor to Chrome. It's a setting in your Affinity application, in the application Preferences dialog, under Performance.
Edit > Preferences (or Ctrl+,)
The ability to use Hardware Acceleration on Windows is a new function in 1.9, and some users' machines are not working well with it. That's why it's something you need to deal with now that you never had to in the past.
Close Aphoto
rename the macros.propcol file to macros.old
Restart Aphoto, it should create a new macros.propcol file with the default macros in the library panel