CTDs are getting out of hand

Installing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

I use a Win10 (1909) MSI Cx62 6QD laptop, i7, nvidia 940MX, 16Gb ram, 500Gb SSD.

I bought the ten DVD set.

After 24 hours I still have NOT successfully installed msfs!!

It crashes to the Desktop (CTD) before completing the install. It gets as far as “World Improvements” – Spain/ Portugal etc. then crashes.

There’s a long thread (going back to 2019) on “failure to install – CTD”

The main successful solution seemed to be:

cmd.exe /C start shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App –FastLaunch

This was tried numerous times…

Working in safe mode

While checking for upgrades – black screen – blue line at bottom, then CTD.

Checked for Win 10 upgrades – installed the latest Win10 upgrade 21H2

Removed the Realtek Audio 11.8.21 6.0.1.866

Tracked the error through Event Viewer:

Module d3ll.dll Ver 10.0.0.19041.1202

Exception code 0xc0000005

RE-tried the – Fast Launch

This time it looked for Updates and showed 92Gb as “Mandatory Update”
Rebooted laptop
Retried the – Fast Launch

Got to “Checking for updates”, Black screen, Blue line (about 50%) then CTD!!!

Looking back on things, I do note that msfs raised a message “Your computer doesn’t meet minimum requirement and performance may be compromised.” The MSI spec (see above) looks OK???

Where do I go from here? Need help.