Stinn

Yes the appdata reset completely fixed the issue. I can't reproduce it unless I use the old version. It happened right after the latest update. Thanks for the help to both you and Gabe, and good luck!

(This got tagged to the wrong message).
Re-naming the '1.0' folder was the solution to my problem, and (in my humble but hard-won experience) beats forcing Windows to update any day of the week..

It's not the best to expect everyone to be up to date though. I had to install the October update myself manually through the Update Assistant, Windows update would not offer it to me.
With the 2004 update, I had to do that too and a bunch of extra stuff because it would BSOD every time trying to install the update until I found out that turning off some Windows features that are activated by default for everyone actually allowed the update to succeed.
You can't expect people to be up to date, unfortunately. And even if they try to be up to date, if they're not very knowledgable on the ins and outs of Windows it might mean they can't even upgrade even if they wanted to.
I think Serif should advise before updating that it'd be better to stay on an older version (EDIT: of Photo) if they rely on new Windows features to be honest. Windows update just isn't stable enough to expect everyone to be even reasonably up to date.

Very odd. 2 of us here tried it and was fine. Can you try this please?
Close Photo. Navigate to %AppData%\Affinity\Photo\ and rename 1.0 to 1.0.backup. Reopen Photo and see if it's any better. Don't worry about the missing stuff. It's all kept in the .backup file.