Sudden problems running my game on Windows (cocos2dx 3.16)

Two players, including a beta tester who has been testing my new version for over a month, have emailed me separately that suddenly my game won’t launch for them. In fact, all of a sudden none of my existing three versions will run. I would assume video drivers, but both have updated. In fact, the one user had updated his drivers before getting this error.

Fortunately (?), I had a problem running them on my wife’s laptop, and I got the 2019 and 2020 versions to run, but it doesn’t help either of the other two guys. Pretty strange solutions, too. 2019 now runs if you turn off Steam Cloud, and for 2020 to run, I had to turn off a Steam function and my call to AudioEngine::lazyInit().

However, like I say, those two still can’t run my game, which makes me extremely hesitant to release the new version.

I’m still on cocos2d-x 3.16, so I’m wondering if it’s worth the effort to try to kludge the newer glew and glfw from 3.17 into my project, or even try to move to cocos2d-x 3.17? I’m at a loss here, and it’s killing me.

thanks