Thank you, everyone! I guess I'll have to make a Reddit account if I can solve this with the help here XD Something I was trying to avoid, but I can see why it might be a necessity with some games.

I'll try borderless window mode. Didn't even see that as an option. I did notice JUST NOW that the game crashed because some Alienware program opened itself, so hopefully, that'll do the trick. I also switched the graphics settings so that the game uses my integrated GPU instead of the RTX. idk, some modern NVIDIA settings might not play too well with such an old game and I don't think I know my way around some of the newer options I didn't have with my GTX 1050 Ti. So far, no problems playing with the integrated graphics card.

And I'll also disable compatibility mode, then. I saw in a bunch of places that it could help a ton with Win11.

Anyway, tysm!