Hello again!
Sorry for how long it took to get back to you, life has been very busy. I did what you recommended with my Nvidia driver in the exact order you typed out for me, and I'm still having issues. Below is my dxdiag from the most recent crash a few minutes ago. My screen has mostly, as I may have said in the original post, been going white and freezing, sometimes crashing and shutting the game itself, sometimes freezing white and forcing me to force-restart my entire computer in order to exit the application. This time it didn't go white, just crashed and closed the game to bring me back to my "home page" (computer background, I'm blanking on the term to refer to it).
I've also, alongside the most recent dxdiag, included the results of the Reliability Monitor scan. I'm not very tech savvy so I will need help deciphering what the results mean. I've included full screenshots taken with my snipping tool application.
Thank you again, so so much.
(P.S.: Once the new free update comes out (the one with the massive bug-fixes that's been announced), I plan on trying again with the update installed and will let you know if the problem still occurs after that, too.)