I uninstalled visual c++ 2015 and did as you mentioned - still causes the error. I disabled ALL mods on the game and tried to load it but still causes the same ucrtbase.dll error. I'm going to reinstall the nvidia drivers aftering using DDU to see if that works. Is it possible to get the stock/default/uncorrupted ucrtbase.dll files (32 & 64-bit) from the latest insider build that I have (22622.586)? I want to try and just replace the files I have to see if that file itself is corrupted and causing the crashes since the game may be trying to load them?
you can try running dism command first then sfc to do this. i've heard that dism should be ran first so that sfc can do its job properly. why? because dism verifies the component store and downloads non-corrupt files to replace the corrupt files and then sfc will repair system files via the component store (i think this is what it does as far i know). if it still said no integrity violations then maybe its actually caused by something else and its nothing to do with ucrtbase.dll. ucrtbase.dll might just be crashing because other things are causing it to crash, it may not have anything to do with ucrtbase.dll being corrupt. you may have to sit there and go through trial and error. who knows, maybe the nvidia drivers are part of the problem this entire time. try to see what you have done before the game was crashing. try to check through the update history if there was an update that installed after the game was working just fine and then try uninstalling it. if you think this is a waste of time then you could try to dualboot or revert back to stable build of windows 11 which is what i think you should first do and try running gta there and see if the problem persists.
im not saying he shouldnt. im just saying that maybe not everyone has the effort and energy to re-setup everything. i guess the better question is if theres a valid/real reason over why he should use windows 11 insider build? if so then maybe dont reinstall windows but if not and hes just using the insider build for the sake of it then maybe he has to come back to the stable build cause by then hes just shooting himself in the foot.
@ward201185 thanks for the detailed suggestions. I've finally figured out the issue - it was a graphics mod I had installed that was causing this error (QuantV). Although I've used this mod all the time without issue, I dont' know why all of a sudden it doesn't work - could be something is conflicting with the latest insider build since the mod uses ENB (?). I used DDU and reinstalled drivers and it still caused the crash. I even uninstalled the entire game and reinstalled it - ran it without mods and it worked fine. I installed all my mods as usual and crash! Removed just the graphics mod and BAM, it worked. So will use another graphics mod for now, but at least it saved me from having to do a fresh install of Windows which I was dreading. Everything is working perfectly smoothly for now so thanks again.
it could just be because windows updated and you didnt notice, you may have to roll back some recent cumulative updates you may suspect to be part of the problem for example. you could still try doing a dualboot (you can use winntsetup for that) with a stable build of windows 11 to see if it works there if you want. insider build can contain and introduce bugs so if you want the best experience, you may want to stay on stable builds. when i said to backup windows before doing so, i regarded it as general advice because anything can happen so even if you had a stable build, you may still try to backup just in case.