FF14 crashing & freezing other windows

[JooHyun]

I cannot play FF14 with friends through Discord or anything as while I am playing FF14, any non-active windows either freezes or crashes.

For example:
- YouTube videos would not play and audio would play for a short bit before it freezes entirely. If I click on that browser window, the video resume but if I alt-tab back into the game, it freezes again
- Discord freezes and crashes making it unplayable with friends
- Spotify would become unresponsive until I click on it again

I've tried the following:
- Change between windows, borderless and full screen mode - none fixed it
- Changed graphic settings
- Turned on/off Windows 11 game focus mode
- Turning off hardware acceleration on Discord is a partial fix: Discord doesn't crash no more but now it stutters.

What fixes it temporarily:
- Reinstalling the game but on next launch it resumes with the same issue.

How do I fix this?

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Spec:
- FF14 Steam version
- Windows 11 Home 64-bit
- 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900KS (32 CPUs), ~3.2GHz
- 64gb ram
- DX 12
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8Gb