I stopped the NVidia telemetry service yesterday, didn't follow all the instructions, just stopped that service.
Earlier today, SOTTR wouldn't start, it took me ages to find a log file complaining about the NVidia driver, that made me remember what I had done - Restarted that service, and the game started immediately!
I need to retry with the full "clean up" instructions...
Just download them from here.
https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/430-39-whql-430-53-hotfix-clean-version.421390/
The page gets updated with the newer drivers so worth bookmarking.