I finally got this going again, but what it took is way out of line with what should be expected of anyone.
I had to do a manual uninstall of Gear in an Administrator account in Safe Mode, and then set the compatibility of the Gear installer to Vista Service Pack 2 (my previous compatibility that worked once and only once before my last Win updates was Windows 7 compatibility). Not sure if it was the Vista compatibility or Safe mode uninstall that made the difference this time, but Gear should really take a look at what’s going on with this, how the uninstalls, reinstalls, and repairs don’t seem to make any difference when GearASPIWDM won’t start. If the only solution is manual uninstalls in the registry, can’t they at least make reg files to do at least some of that? I got it to work once with a Win 7 compatibility install without going into the registry, but I have no idea why that worked, and it only worked once.
No matter what the state of a user’s system, it shouldn’t be this hard.
Using Windows 10 Redstone 1 with latest updates.