External monitor no longer works after playing BF2!

If anyone can help sooner than later it'd be very much appreciated.

I launched BF2 for the first time and did the whole setup routine, including selecting which monitor to use. Seems like that'd be super simple and not a problem. However it started bugging out when I selected the external monitor. That was weird and I still don't know why but I thought whatever and just used the main one.

As far as I knew, that was the extent of it. The game ran well enough. I did try enabling the extra render settings. That required a restart and made loading extremely slow. Plus the results didn't look good enough to justify that so I reverted it.

When I exited and turned the extern monitor back on, it started bugging out again. It just disconnects then reconnects in an endless loop to the point where I can't use the laptop at all. The screens appear, then go black, then back and forth. So I have to keep the monitor unplugged.

The weird thing is that when I plug it back in, everything looks fine for a couple of seconds. But then inevitably it goes right back to the issue.

I've tried restarting the system, unplugging all the cables the monitor uses, as well as reinstalling my display drivers. So far nothing has fixed it.

The game is installed on an external hard drive, if that's relevant. I haven't installed many things on an external hard drive before but the few times so far hasn't caused any issues.

This is really strange and worrying. I've never had anything like this happen, where a game can cause lasting effects on my system. So any and all advice is welcome.

Thank you.

System information:
OS Name Microsoft Windows 10 Home
System Manufacturer HP
System Model HP Spectre x360 Convertible 15-eb0xxx
System Type x64-based PC
System SKU 9GB30UA#ABA
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz, 2592 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s)
Memory Address 0x50000000-0x61FFFFFF NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti with Max-Q Design