I feel your pain and frustration. That OS refresh scenario is worse than going to the dentist! Then, after all of that, to have the problem solved, and then re-appear. All that time and effort. Not a process you want to ever do again.
Between the time that it was working and when the problem returned,
> I presume no other apps were added.
> was the PC powered on/off one or more times?
> was Visio the last app installed?
> can you disable some of the Startup apps that automatic begin when Windows launches?
Hardware related:
> presumably, you have plenty of RAM
> the system uses "harddrive" to augment RAM by doing active read/writes for running program
> might there be regions with bad / damaged bits?
It may be, that you have to uninstall all the apps one more time. Then run hard drive optimizer to check for bad sectors. i vaguely recall needing to clean out some "caches" too. Follow this with reinstall of Office followed by Visio. Then, do several PC power on cycles to verify everything is working. Presumably, Visio is working fine at this point. If not, perhaps one more Windows refresh.
Also, are your app data files/documents backed up in separate location? It maybe there is corruption or virus in one of them??? Just asking to cover all possible bases.
So, in the subsequent reinstalling of apps, just do one at a time. Each time followed by multiple power on/off cycles and verification of Visio. Hopefully, this traps the offending step. It will probably extend that 5 hours.
I merely offer the above as a possible, incremental methodology.