Bizarre Browser Issue On New Win 10 Installation

never seen this one chaps; embarrasses me that I do not even have a faint clue what is going on.

this is a newish hp elite desktop with new drive, etc, fresh clean install of windows 10, all setup, leaned-down, tight. was running super.
came in today, booted it up to do some work on it, and IE11 was toast.
incoherent, though it was running. no erros in windows error log. Chrome was fine. IE11 was up, and I could type addresses in, but it was utterly unresponsive. nothing. no reaction. waited and waited. ran ccleaner just to feel good. ran malwarebytes. nothing. clean.

full shutdown and reboot. THIS TIME CHROME FAILED THE EXACT SAME WAY.
IE11 works perfectly. Chrome is a zombie like ie11 was on the prior bootup.
Not even the Settings page in Chrome will open. wait a minute or three and get a "page unresponsive" message.
nothing I do has any effect on the issue.

what on earth am I looking at?