Premiere 2018 freezes while "Loading PlayerMediaCore.prm"

When I launch PE2018 on my new Lenovo 8185 (Display adapter "Intel HD Graphics"), the loading screen freezes when it gets to the point that it is "Loading PlayerMediaCore.prm".

For the record, I checked the graphics driver and made sure it is the latest one. Initially, I only updated it on the Win OS level, but then I saw a more specific driver update on the Levono site and installed that one.

As a side note, this is "progress" over the first issue I was seeing when loading the application would immediately at the "Initializing application" stage... The good news is that I got past that... but now the startup procedure freezes on this PlayerMediaCore stage.

I did some checking on other similar threads. One was almost identical to mine but it turned out to be specifically about an AMD Graphics card... and was resolved focusing on that card. My adapter is an "Intel HD Graphics", so the solutions found in that thread do not apply to my adapter. For reference, here is a link to that thread:\

https://forums.adobe.com/message/10801402#10801402

I did do some tests and tried some things that were used in that thread (and some ideas of my own), however.

Here are some of them:

1. In the Debug Database.txt file, I went to the DS.ForceCPUOnly entry and set it to "true    true".

I tried opening PE2018 again but saw no change in behavior.

2. I took a look in the file called Plugin Loading.log   ...

The last few lines do indeed show everything stopped as the program was trying to load "PlayerMediaCore" in the Registry and from the disk.

Here are the relevant last few lines:

Loading C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Elements 2018\Plug-ins\Common\PlayerMediaCore.prm

Invalid registry entry found so the plugin will be loaded from disk.

Loading from disk...

There was an error loading C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Elements 2018\Plug-ins\Common\PlayerMediaCore.prm from the plugin cache

The registry key will be deleted and the plugin will be loaded from disk.

Loading from disk...

After that, log entries into that text file just stop (which makes sense because startup froze at that time.)

3. OK... Here's when I tried something tricky. It didn't work but it was worth a shot.

Since the path to the PlayerMediaCore.prm file was listed (see previous #2), I thought perhaps the file was corrupted. I have PE2019 up and running. It also has this file, so just for fun, I changed the name of the 2018 version to PlayerMediaCore_old.prm and copied the PE2019 version of the file to this directory.

I wasn't clever enough, however, as when I tried to load the program, it somehow knew I had changed the name, so tried to load that original renamed file (although it had an altered name). Since that didn't work, I revered those file rename/copy commands to get me back to where I was. (Nothing ventured, nothing gained.)

4. Out of curiosity, I went into the registry to see what the entry said there that PE didn't like.

Other than the "default" REG_SZ entry, the only other entry was a "HasPipl" entry with a data value set to "0".

I made no changes there... I just looked.

5. I took a look in this file: BadDrivers.txt

Here is the single entry there: ##FALSE###FALSE#0

So that's it... As the similar referenced thread came to a warm and fuzzy conclusion (but dealing with an AMD video adapter), I'm hoping a similar solution is already know (or will be found) for my own video adapter (assuming that is somehow the culprit).

Any ideas what to try next?

Thanks!