Yes, I thought that might be the case. Playing around with the Task Manager was only a poor workaround for the actual problem. For some reason, PB's IDE & PBVM do not interact well with those two services when active. It's a problem that I can remember being reported even back into PB v11.5.
The problem with touch services also seems to affect the PB installation process as well. I also think that these problems are Intel CPU related as I can't replicate these problems on my AMD processors. Very weird!