X-mas patch has broken my game

[Tanth]

I had a few posts on the /r/playrust reddit but they recommended I post here to try and get a better answer.

Since the latest patch I cannot launch the game. I hit play in steam, I get the initial black and white rust popup with the EAC logo and blue loading bar. The loading bar completes, the window closes and then . . . that's it. The next popup which prompts you to choose the graphics settings never appears and the game no longer shows as "running" in steam. No error messages pop-up, nothing, nada, zip.

Here is what I have done thus far to remedy the situation with no luck.

Updated nvidia drivers.
Windows update.
Uninstalled EAC then deleted the folder / re-verified game files to force a reinstall of EAC.
Completely reinstall Rust on SSD
Completely reinstall Rust on Hard drive.
Reinstall Rust on previous SSD
Reinstall Steam
Close out all antivirus/firewall apps.
Close background tasks.
Close out my VPN clients and apps like teamviewer etc.
Launch game from folders as Admin

Nothing is working and yet I never get any errors to tell me what the issue may be.

System specs:

AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Processor - 3.6 ghz precision boost - 6 cores/12 threads unlocked - Cache: 3 mb/16 mb (l2/l3)
EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SC GAMING -  6GB GDDR5, DX12 OSD 
16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 DRAM 3000MHz

Any help would be appreciated as I really want to get back into the game.

Thank you

[ShadowMoses]

This is probably the same issue I am facing. See if Windows installed the same updates and report back.

See: Rust crashes after Windows 1809 update (Client GUI doesn't show ..

[Tanth]

I did a windows update rollback but when the computer came back on it was running the same version of windows. I think the stupid POS rebooted, saw it was out of date and updated again. I am manually uninstalling the updates from December to see if that works.