That being said, its obvious that I'm not going to be able to get this working, so, my next step would be to just delete it.
Since nobody ever reported this problem, it's clearly something very wrong is happening with your MSFS installation, so the correct next step should have been try to work on that, possibly reinstalling the simulator itself, something you'll likely have to do anyway sooner or later, because with that kind of issue, you'll have other problems sooner or later.
