Try placing a blue tower as your first tower. It'll prompt you to build a red as your second tower, and the timing somehow lines up that way for me. I have no idea how the bug exists in the first place, but that may be a workaround.
It does work when placing blue first, then upgrading range (upgrading damage results in a softlock for me)
And regarding the display problem, I removed Paint Defense from my "do not disturb" list in my avast antivirus and the windows work now (except windowed x4) turns out avast was just being annoying.
Edit: Scratch that, I think I know now, the softlock happens when you call the wave early, I tried waiting it out for it to naturally spawn and it works everytime, in any combination of color