Zoom will not open, even after reinstall

[Jack17]

Firstly, I want to stress how breathtakingly bad the chatbot is. There are plenty of bad chatbots out there, but I have never seen one that wasn't able to answer *any* query put to it.  It is honestly impressively useless, especially as there does not seem to be any combination of words that will actually lift this digital portcullis and let me speak to a real person.

My issue is that my Zoom client does not open. It worked fine for over a year but abruptly stopped last week. I have checked camera and microphone permissions, security settings, cleared caches, restarted, uninstalled and reinstalled but it still does not open. This is the case whether I am following a meeting link or just opening the client from Start. There are no error messages. It does not show as an application or process in task manager - it does not run at all.

I'd appreciate any advice.