Cannot Open FC 26 since Wednesday

I believe I’m having an issue with EA Anti‑Cheat on Windows 11 Home where the installer completes successfully, the service installs, but the driver file never appears in C:\Windows\System32\drivers. Because of this, EA SPORTS FC 26 will not launch.

For context, the game was working perfectly on Wednesday evening. I stopped playing for a few hours, came back later the same night, and from that point onward the game has refused to launch due to the anti‑cheat driver not being present. The only system change that happened between sessions was a graphics‑driver update for my ASUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. When I noticed the issue, I reverted back to the previous driver using DDU, as I’ve had a similar problem with a Call of Duty title in the past that was fixed by rolling back the GPU driver. Unfortunately, reverting the driver did not resolve the issue this time.

Here are the key details:

• EA Anti‑Cheat installer runs without errors (“Install success”).
• The EA AntiCheat service is created normally.
• The driver file (EAAntiCheat.sys) never appears after reboot.
• No entries appear in Windows Protection History.
• Event Viewer does not show any EA Anti‑Cheat blocks.
• Norton 360 is installed but fully disabled during installation.
• Windows 11 Home, fully updated.
• Running Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceGuard -ClassName Win32_DeviceGuard shows:
  • CodeIntegrityPolicyEnforcementStatus = 2
  • VirtualizationBasedSecurityStatus = 0
  • UsermodeCodeIntegrityPolicyEnforcementStatus = 0
• Discord overlay is also being blocked, which suggests Windows is enforcing a driver trust policy even though no UI toggle is visible.

Here is what I have already tried to fix the issue:

• Fully reinstalling EA Anti‑Cheat multiple times
• Restarting the PC after each install
• Reinstalling EA App and FC 26
• Updating Windows to the latest version
• Rolling back GPU drivers using DDU
• Reinstalling the latest GPU drivers cleanly
• Disabling Norton 360 completely
• Checking Windows Security → no blocks shown
• Checking Protection History → empty
• Checking Event Viewer (System, Application, CodeIntegrity) → no EA Anti‑Cheat entries
• Confirming the EA Anti‑Cheat folder and service install correctly
• Attempting to run the EA Anti‑Cheat installer with command‑line flags (no output)
• Verifying that the .sys driver never appears in the drivers folder
• Confirming that other overlays/drivers (e.g., Discord) are also being blocked

It appears that Windows is silently rejecting the EA Anti‑Cheat driver, even though the installer reports success. Could you advise on how to proceed, or whether EA Anti‑Cheat requires a specific driver signing or trust configuration that might be affected by this?

Thanks for your help.