Ok, this is a weird windows thing.
It turns out that secondary hard drives may have been the issue.
I had 3 other traditional HDDs plugged into sata 1,2,3.
Sata 0 is my samsung SSD and main OS drive.
Nothing OS related, or software installed on these HDDs. I use 1, 2, & 3 for various data storage; gopro videos and such. they're old drives but not failing.
Disabling them in the bios, unplugging the sata/power, rebooted, and everything seemed to be working fine again.
I'm not entirely confident that I found the source of the problem yet. After booting up, gigabyte app center notified me of motherboard driver updates, which i'm running through right now. I'll finish this up, do some more testing, see what I can determine.
The reason I even suspected drives issues to begin with is that when I tried to re-download iCUE, firefox or chrome would freeze after the DL started. The file appeared to download fine but the browser would lock up requiring force close. I was not downloading to a drive that I disabled.
Sounds like drivers issues, but idk. My "expertise" gets fuzzy when I start getting into drivers and kernal issues.