I finally broke down and built a new machine after I was able to get Windows 10 to act somewhat stable. I installed Windows 10 Pro x64 fresh. Without trimming any processes I have 79 background processes plus 30 Windows processes running. Without a whole lot of trying I was able to trim that down to 48. Something in there is still causing AH to minimize while I am playing, so there is something else I need to seek out. Otherwise, it seems pretty good already. So, my conclusion is along the lines of something we already know, which is to say updating in place is going to leave problems in the system. All of those updates and old hardware devices that you are not even using will probably influence the update poorly, so if you are going to try to update in place I would reinstall Windows before you do. Even better, just update in place and then install fresh on a newly wiped drive, or new hard drive.
Things that are still bugging me include the fact that all other browsers are sluggish on startup. Edge, and IE are the fastest even on fresh installs of Pale Moon, so you know somethings going on there! BitLocker. Maybe it's good, but I don't like anything that isn't easy to turn off, and so far if there is an easy way I haven't found it.
Autodesk got my 3DS Max problems sorted out on Aug 11, so no more issues there either.
Even SLI is holding at this point, so I'm going to call it all good! It only took two weeks (hehe).
