Help running AoE 3 Complete with Nvidia

I got a strange problem, I can run AoE3 fine on my Surface Pro 1 from 2013 (with intel iGPU), if just a bit slowly.

It can run fine on a laptop with 7970M (ATI card from 2012-ish) + i7 3610QM that has a wonky switchable GPU system that pipes the dGPU output to the Intel iGPU (who cares about saving battery on a DTR...) that caused me no end of pain until AMD/ATI + Intel got its act together and even then I still have to configure it game to game at times.

But it will immediately go into not responding when I try it on my desktop... Which have a 2080 ti + i5 6600k...

I am on latest nvidia drivers, didn't fix it.

I tried compatibility mode (xp, vista), admin forces, etc. Didn't do anything.

I am running at 4k desktop, could it also have some issues with it?

I also have a oculus rift + roomscale hooked up to it, and I know that it can cause strange issues (MW4 Merc won't allow mouse input any more due to it seeing rift controllers somehow).

Anyone know how to solve this problem? Is it nvidia? Is it the 4k resolution? Is it the extra "hidden" monitor that it is trying to display to and can't deal with VR?

At this point, I need to more or less keep that old laptop around to run "old" games from early 2000s xp games. I hope it never dies... Anyone got any ideas?