I turned on WER and got a crash dump for PoE
Exception Code: 0xC0000005
Exception Information: The thread tried to read from or write to a virtual address for which it does not have the appropriate access.
So in addition to killing off most processes before i ran the game, i killed off Actual Windows Manager (Running v8.2.2) and found that this was the culprit. The above WER reference made my think about AWM being a possible issue. Once i added an exception in AWM configuration settings, the game exited without a crash.
So problem has been solved. Thank you for your time and help though.
fearless's post in Crash on exit was marked as the answer