Game started freezing my entire system a few days ago

Dear Tech people & support team!

A few days ago PoE started to sometimes not react anymore - which in itself is bad but manageable if it would let me close PoE and restart it. However if I close it (no matter if I do that via Task Manager, Alt F4 or the error prompt) the entire system freezes and nothing reacts to any input anymore - interestingly I can still move my mouse and its position is being tracked correctly on my screens, the keyboard input doesnt work and as far as I can tell nothing I click will work. I tested it with videos and music running in the background or in tabs in my browser and they freeze up too, usually with a few seconds delay after the closure attempt of PoE. So far the only solution has been pressing the reset button which obviously isn't ideal plus the issue has been occurring a bit too regularly. Freezes do not occur if I simply alt f4 during the game or use escape to close to desktop.

Here's what I already did and checked:
Windows Updates including optional updates - no changes since quite some time before the issue started to occur.
Graphics Card driver - shows up to date - I'm running a Radeon RX 6600 XT.
Other drivers: no changes recently
Changed to Vulkan from DirectX12 - no change
Changed back to DX12 - no change
Almost all settings set to lowest possible to reduce freezes and lag ingame as much as possible - no change
Changed CPU cores being allowed to 3,4,5 & 6 with 1&2 being disabled for PoE - no change


The game is installed through steam on my main drive (SSD) - I firstly checked the integrity of the game files which didn't resolve the issue, i have now moved the game to a different physical drive to see if maybe some parts of the main drive are corrupted or in some way damaged and result in the issue - not a hardware person so I don't know if that could be a potential cause. This also didn't fix it.

Here are the situations I can remember that froze the game.

First it occured during a loading screen from zone to zone - tried to close to restart and it froze.

I've also had this happen several times during login loading screens where it would just stop loading and freeze the game (everything else is fine until I try to quit PoE by the way - I can play other games on the side for like 1h without issue nothing happens there), what I noticed about the logging in issue though this may be anecdotal evidence - if I try to log into the character that just got stuck it is much more likely to break immediately during loading, if I switch to another character I don't think it has failed to load for me yet and I can usually switch characters afterwards by just logging out (of the character - not back to login screen) and into the other character.

Today it occured when logging in while getting about 40 Kingsmarch Popups simultaneously from finished maps (not sure if that has something to do with it though - seems more coincidental than causational)

I also had it happen in Kingsmarch just standing around - tabbed out to look something up and when i clicked back in the game froze up immediately - so it can also happen in zones but seemed to be more rare

I think there were 1-3 more distinct situations that were different from the previous ones mentioned but I just can't remember and unfortunately I didn't track it right away.

So yeah I've been playing a lot these past few weeks and the issue only started maybe 3-4 days ago at most and before then everything was perfectly fine (aside from the usual lagging out due to to high mob density and effect stacking etc - if you have a solution for that let me know - my only solution would be "get a better pc" so far). Would love to go back to just being able to play without worrying if it will screw my documents or other stuff that I've got open.

I'll potentially try uninstalling and re-installing next if none of the other things I can find online seem to work.
EDIT: did just that - no change still breaks the PC
EDIT: I noticed that while frozen I can turn off both screens and turn them back on and the game is closed and the rest resumes working - not ideal but this leads me to believe it might be graphics card related?

Appreciate your help and I'm looking forward to hopefully hearing of a solution that fixes it. Happy to send any documents or run any diagnosis tools that you might need me to run. Just let me know what to do and how and you'll get it back asap.

Best Wishes & thanks a lot

Also tried uninstalling Steam and re-installing it - didn't work

I've now been able to recreate the issue with another game (only once) - spam clicking during loadingscreen / boot up will also result in a freeze. So I'm none the wiser now...