Unfortunately none of your suggestions worked. I stayed around in the room for around 3 minutes or so, no dice. I also tried playing with everything on low, but that didn't work either.
I'm not sure if that's important or not, but when I talked to the soldier for the very first time, it worked- the soldier started talking- but then a Shade came into the room and it caused the conversation to end, and since then I cannot start it again. Perhaps that's a glitch in scripting?
And yes, I'm playing the PC version if that changes anything.