IEdriver is driving me insane, seriously insane - selenium

Question

I'm losing the will to live with IE 11 on an windows 2016 box.
I inherited this windows box, and the test code. I'm not a tester, but nobody else will help.
compile 'org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-java:3.12.0'
and have downloaded and I can confirm I'm using IEdriverServer 32 bit V 3.12
I've tried messing around with the security settings until I got extremely bored, and I've tried adding the poxy registry change for Windows.
I keep getting this error message at least once in my test suite though. I can navigate to the proper url in IE no problem from the server.
org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: Failed to navigate to http://properurl. This usually means that a call to the COM method IWebBrowser2::Navigate2() failed.
Build info: version: '3.12.0', revision: '7c6e0b3', time: '2018-05-08T14:04:26.12Z'
System info: host: 'hostname', ip: 'yada yada', os.name: 'Windows Server 2016', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '10.0', java.version: '1.8.0_144'
Driver info: org.openqa.selenium.ie.InternetExplorerDriver
Capabilities {acceptInsecureCerts: false, browserName: internet explorer, browserVersion: 11, javascriptEnabled: true, pageLoadStrategy: normal, platform: WINDOWS, platformName: WINDOWS, proxy: Proxy(direct), se:ieOptions: {browserAttachTimeout: 0, elementScrollBehavior: 0, enablePersistentHover: true, ie.browserCommandLineSwitches: , ie.ensureCleanSession: false, ie.fileUploadDialogTimeout: 3000, ie.forceCreateProcessApi: false, ie.usePerProcessProxy: false, ignoreProtectedModeSettings: false, ignoreZoomSetting: false, initialBrowserUrl: http://localhost:54081/, nativeEvents: true, requireWindowFocus: false}, setWindowRect: true, timeouts: {implicit: 0, pageLoad: 300000, script: 30000}}
Here's the code
System.setProperty("webdriver.ie.driver", ReadProperties.machine("ie_driver"));
InternetExplorerOptions options = new InternetExplorerOptions();
// options.introduceFlakinessByIgnoringSecurityDomains();
org.openqa.selenium.Proxy proxy = new org.openqa.selenium.Proxy();
proxy.setProxyType(org.openqa.selenium.Proxy.ProxyType.DIRECT);
options.setProxy(proxy);
REAL_DRIVER = new InternetExplorerDriver(options);
It doesn't always happen in the same test, but it ALWAYS happens at least once.
What is also happening is that the tests now take an incredible length of time, which case the CPU to max out, which makes the tests never complete.
If anyone has any suggestions, or ideas to get more information from the debugging, or even words of encouragement to coerce me into destroying the Windows box, I would be more than happy.
The tests all run perfectly fine in Chrome, obviously.