Okay, so I guess the game just does not like my hard drive as I had the idea that maybe it's my hard drive that's the issue, so I plugged in a flash drive, copied the game to it and, low and behold, the game worked. I guess for now until I figure out what the issue it has with my hard drive is, I'll have to play off my flash drive.
I'm not exactly sure it has something to do with permissions as I even tried changing the folder permissions to allow full access to all users, but then again, I just remember my flash drive is formatted in FAT32 for some reason, so NTFS folder permissions are removed when a folder is transferred to a FAT32 drive, allowing anyone or any thing that interacts with the folder full access 100% of the time. If I get around to getting an external hard drive or at least an adapter, I'd try it out on a second HDD, but for now this is what I've got to work with.
I've had trouble with file sharing permissions settings before that felt like black magic to me (I never could figure out the inconsistencies after looking it up and trying over and over again). That was after wiping my HDD and reinstalling Windows as well - so same premise as you have. Thankfully my issue wasn't with Strive at least and I did get a workaround that's still "working" for me. Anyhow, I'm glad you got it working.